Macquarie Rivulet – 30 January 2020

Bob and myself were keen for some canyoning, but choices were somewhat limited. One canyon that was open that neither of us had visited was Macquarie Rivulet near Albion Park.

So we travelled down to Albion Park in Bob’s car, stopped there for a break, then continued on to Macquarie Pass and stopped at the carpark at the start of Clover Hill Road.

From there it was quite a pleasant walk along the closed off old farm road, to eventually reach Macquarie Rivulet just upstream of Rainbow Falls. We then crossed over to the far side and followed a faint track that took us upstream to the bottom of Clover Falls. There we crossed again and then some more climbing took us to the top of the falls.

There are several more waterfalls higher up, but the usual access route passes through private property and can no longer be used. We may have been able to continue to go higher from where we were, but as we were not familiar with the area, we decided to start here – at the top of Clover Falls.

It was a fairly big drop, and we used both our ropes to descend. When we pulled down the ropes, we could see that our longest rope – a 45 m rope was not quite long enough. I would estimate the drop at about 30 m.

We then reached the point where we had earlier crossed the creek. This time we continued down the creekbed. We were soon at the top of some smaller drops. WE used the rope for a very short drop and other we could scramble down. We then reached the top of the next major waterfall – Mulangong Falls.

This involved an easy abseil of about 20 m.

We continued downstream. It was not far to where we had made our first crossing, and we soon reached the top of Rainbow Falls. This is the only part of the canyon that the creek goes down a slot – and not a very constricted one at that.

A short abseil took us to the bottom of the top part of the falls, and then a wade (or swim?) took us to the top of the next part. Another short short abseil to descend.

Then, not far downstream was a more impressive waterfall. We descended this with a single 22 m abseil. But, Bob noticed that we had to abseil down past a loose flake of rock, so it would have been much safer to descend this waterfall with two shorter abseils, by crossing the stream half way down and using another belay point on that side.

Below this the creek levels off. We continued down to find a nice shady place to stop for lunch. We then kept waking downstream, sometimes following a faint track on the bank, to reach a set of pools and jumps visited often by tourists.

A short way downstream, a track leaves and goes down the creek to a lower carpark. We tuned off that track and followed another track that climbed up to the Clover Hill Carpark. It was a very short walk back to Bob’s car.

This was a pleasant day out, and it was nice to get back to some canyoning. The locals have set up the canyon with a lot  of belay points – often sets of ring bolts. It is probably often visited by local scout groups who want an easy adventure.