Looking Back 50 Years – Short Creek Canyon – October 1975

On a recent bushwalk, Bob reminded me that it was about 50 years ago that we did our first trip together. This was a canyoning trip I had put on for the Kameruka Bushwalkering Club from Mt Irvine to Short Creek Canyon back in October 1975.

I hunted on my computer, and found some old scans of slides from that trip and thought it worth posting them here.

In the party was Bob Sault, John Atkinson and Trevor Carr. Bob was still a high school student at the time.

This one is looking down Short Creek from above the abseils –

First Abseil

Second Abseil

This last photo shows Bob lower down the creek –

Short Creek Canyon is not an easy canyon, mainly because it is quite remote and involves quite a lot of scrub and tricky navigation to get to it and back to Mt Wilson.

Our route was from Mt Irvine, along the Irvine Range to the Tessellated Pavement and then down a nearby pass to the Wollangambe River, then up another pass on the far side to the very vague ridges of Lost Flat. As well as the ridges being very indistinct, they were covered in thick scrub – mainly mountain holly which as well as being prickly, they impeded visual navigation. The only official map of the area was the notoriously poor one inch to the mile Wallerawang Sheet. But I had obtained some provisional 1:25,000 dyeline maps which were a lot better at showing the ridge junctions. To navigate, you had to carefully follow compass bearings along a section of ridge and use dead reckoning to estimate forward progress. And some of the sandstone rock had a lot of ironstone in it which caused compass mischief.

What helped was that I had traversed Lost Flat the year before on a trip with Springwood Bushwalking Club to the Bungleboori Crater. So I knew what to expect, and we all wore long pants and gardening gloves.

Short Creek Canyon had been pioneered a few years early by Chris Cosgrove and Nic Bendeli. Chris had reported four abseils, but we got down the canyon in two.

I only visited Short Creek one other time – as the last canyon on a 5 day Boxing Day Canyoning Trip back in 2013. On that trip, we seem to have down three abseils.