On Sunday the 22nd of June 2025, Col and I were heading home from Strathgordon and looking for a short walk that wouldn’t delay us too much. We ended up settling on Tim Shea, but rather than doing the AllTrails route from Florentine Road we decided to take an untracked route from Gordon River Road to save time.

The Stats

Distance: 3.8km (return)
Time: 2½ (inc. lunch break on summit)
Elevation: 311m

Location

Tim Shea is a mountain about 13km northwest of Maydena. Our starting point at The Needles car park on Gordon River Road is about a 14 minute drive west from Maydena or a 45 minute drive east from Strathgordon.

Route

As you leave the car park to the north, there is a pad that leads you through the initial scrub to the button grass plain behind, although this quickly disappears as you make your way onto the boggy button grass.

There is a short flat plain before you start heading up. The initial part of the hill is reasonable clear of scrub, but there is a banding of scrub below the ridge line. Looking at the image below, we initially stayed to the left, wanting to avoid the scrubby creek line coming down on the right, and thinking this would minimise the amount of scrub we’d have to deal with at the top. However, as we discovered on the way down, there is a clearer path, except for the very initial section, underneath the power line that goes up to the summit. In fact, as you reach the power poles towards the top of the ridge line, there is in fact a clear pad from one pole to the next.

On reaching the ridge, after about 500 metres of climbing, including about 200m in elevation, the scrub disappears and there is another open button grass plain that is easily crossed to the road which makes its way to the communications towers towards the summit. From here is it mostly a road walk to the summit, although the initial section of road is steep. However, it wasn’t long until we found ourselves at the end of the road, just below the summit proper.