But high up in the Glass House Mountains, an easy hour away from Brisbane, are two popular climbs that have become an absolute headache for local rescue crews, and tragically, have claimed a number of lives.

Mount Tibrogargan and Mount Beerwah are two of the many peaks in the Glass House Mountains National Park, sitting 364 metres and 556 metres above sea level.

And while most Europeans would scoff at hiking a mountain only a few hundred metres high, the two peaks are trickier than most.

They’re incredibly steep, have loose rock faces and are littered with sudden drop-offs and dangerous overhangs.

These are risks Greg Toman, a member of Queensland Fire Emergency Service’s Remote Mountain Rescue crew, understands all too well.

Whenever someone gets stuck anywhere in the Glass House Mountains, Mr Toman is generally one of the people heading out to rescue them.

Mr Toman works on the Vertical Rescue Instruction team in the QFES and is regularly visiting the national park to help people who have landed themselves in trouble.

The number of rescues off Mount Tibrogargan and Beerwah is continuing to rise as Queensland’s Sunshine Coast becomes a tourist hotspot.

The rescues were happening so often, QFES decided to expand their capabilities. Almost two years ago, the service trained up a group of 11 people on the Sunshine Coast and seven in Brisbane to perform expert mountain rescues.

In 2017, the Remote Mountain Rescue team was involved in 30 individual rescues and assisted 60 people. A helicopter, which can cost thousands of dollars to run, was required 11 times.

Mr Toman said his team deals with all kinds of people up the mountains. Some are well-prepared, others are “absolute boofheads”. The worst part is — it’s been happening for years.

“All the rescues are tricky ones and they’re all strenuous because we have to carry our pack and all our gear. It’s even harder stretchering people down, the rescues are tricky. There’s nothing glamorous about it,” Mr Toman said.

The firefighter remembered one recent rescue the team attended where they were called at 5.30pm. The team were halfway up the western side of Mount Beerwah when they were told the people needing rescuing were actually on the eastern face.

By the time the team hiked back down the mountain and up the eastern side, it was pitch black.

“We had to abseil down and anchor ourselves in the dark without seeing much at all,” Mr Toman said.

It was past 1.30am when they finally found the lost hikers.

“They didn’t realise how incredibly lucky they were because they’d managed to fall into a little ditch metres away from a 60m drop,” he said.

The team decided it would be best to rest until first light, eventually leading them to safety the next morning. But that wasn’t the only mammoth rescue.

Exactly a month ago, emergency services were called to Tibrogargan to a fallen climber.

Paramedics, a fire crew, SES workers and a Rescue 500 chopper were eventually called in to winch the person, who had a wrist injury, abrasions and a concussion, to safety.

And the last rescue Mr Toman did was on January 28, when they were called to help a bushwalker who had fallen 30 metres on Tibrogargan and broken his leg.

Rescue 500, the state’s helicopter emergency rescue service, took to Facebook to post a video of the rescue, revealing it took close to 20 people.

On the state’s national park’s website, Tibrogargan is described as a “challenging and potentially dangerous rock face climbing site that requires a high level of expertise and equipment”.

Signs also warn climbers of this.

The craggy peaks are also listed as a landscape of national significance and the views from Tibrogargan and Beerwah are described as two of the state’s most beautiful lookouts.

But as Mr Toman said, the issue generally isn’t getting up it, it’s getting down.

Tibrogargan starts with an easy few hundred metres of bushwalking before hikers reach a notorious place nicknamed “Chicken Rock”.

That’s the steepest part of the climb where hikers either chicken out or “scramble” up a nearly vertical rock face to the summit.

Getting down, climbers generally have to crabwalk or slowly scramble back down, otherwise they could potentially tumble hundreds of metres.

The situation around Beerwah is similar and Toman said a vast number of their rescues are from hikers attempting to head down a bad part of the rock face and “freezing” when they realise they can’t do it.

Most videos on YouTube of people climbing the mountains are captioned with “I nearly died” or “I slipped” or “falling down Mount Tibrogargan”.

Mr Toman said this is part of the problem.

“People see these mountains in videos on YouTube or on social media and think they can do it so they turn up disorganised and having no idea what exactly they need to do,” he said.

Despite Mr Toman being completely content in his job as a part-time firefighter, part-time mountain rescuer, he did say it was “frustrating” having to risk a team to rescue “boofheads”.

“Bad things happen when people don’t do their homework,” he said.

“There’s plenty of people heading to the mountain to do silly stuff and often it’s in the middle of the night or at dark. There’s a big difference between rock climbers who read the guidebook and are completely prepared but things just accidentally go wrong for them to boofheads that head out there purely to be stupid,” he said.

QFES and Queensland Parks and Wildlife are now engaged in an ongoing discussion to ensure fewer people need rescuing from the mountain.

They’re expected to meet in the coming weeks to discuss a potential solution to the growing number of rescues.

The QFES also works closely with the Queensland Ambulance Service, the SES and Rescue 500, the team that runs helicopter rescues.

But sadly, for now, the weekly rescues are expected to continue. Authorities tried closing Tibrogargan after a number of fatal accidents and Beerwah was also closed from 2009 to 2015 in a bid to stop people from hurting themselves.

In January 2008, Brisbane teenager Annabel Choy died after she fell 150 metres from Tibrogargan when part of the cliff she was climbing gave way, and in January 2016, a person died after they fell 250 metres from the mountain.