This was a pleasant outing with Bob visiting a nice canyon. It was a warm day, but the canyon was quite cold – particularly the swims.
When we set off from Sydney, the Cumberland Plain was enveloped in a pall of bushfire smoke. Something we have had to endure a lot recently, but minor compared to enduring a bushfire at close hand. When we arrived at Blackheath, the air was clear. We set off down the track to the start of he canyon and soon arrived at the first of three constrictions.
The first constriction is short and easy to negotiate. It did have one cold swim however.
Between it and the second constriction is not far, but some of the going is rough, which does not make this canyon a good one to take young kids through. Here is Bob climbing down the start of the second constriction.
After a short tunnel section and some more scrambling, you emerge into a nice easy section of creek walking, often on the rainforest banks. Pleasant going indeed. Then just past a pass out to the east, the creek starts to drop through boulders and then a little more scrambling and you reach the third constriction – the best and longest section of canyon in the creek. But its the only one that does not have any swims in normal water levels – just deep wades. Here are some photos –
We didn’t bother walking from the end of the canyon down to the Grose cliffs. We were keen to climb out before it got too hot. We used an easy pass to climb out and then walked along a ridge to reach the track along Hat Hill Range. On the way back, it was now very smokey, and we looked for a shady spot to stop for lunch – but ended up having lunch on the way down at Wentworth Falls Lake, where there was good shade and a breeze. But we did find an interesting Aboriginal site that Bob had read about online. There were a number of sharpening grooves –
And, much harder to spot, some engravings. They were not large, but quite clear when you discerned them – a series of Lyrebird footprints. Bob had thought, from his research, that were Emu footprints, but Evan, a local Aboriginal, pointed out to me that they were Lyrebird tracks. Thanks for this clarification Evan.
The next photo contains 5 of the footprints. Bob is pointing to one.
It had been an interesting day out.