For many years now, I have been fortunate to be able to leave on Boxing Day for an extended canyoning trip in the Northern Blue Mountains. Some of these six day trips have been visiting known but remote canyons, others have been more exploratory.
This Boxing Day, the trip was mainly exploratory. Five of us – Rik, Rob, John, Matt and myself headed out to explore an area that we had visited a the year before. On the previous trip we had found some really great canyons. Two in particular were long and quite technical. They each had six or more abseils. But the area is quite remote – with a long walk-in required. And over the years it has become very scrubby.
The first day of the trip was a long walk in, where we established a base camp where we ended up staying four nights. We could get water by dropping to a nearby creek (a 30 – 40 minute round trip) or by bringing water back with us on day trips from the creeks we explored. It was a long walk to get to this campsite and it was also a long walk from that to check out what we thought were likely creeks to be canyons.
The first creek we checked was close to where we had found a low quality canyon the year before. This new creek turned out to be similar. It had a nice section of canyon – but it was not very long. On the way out, the view of the nearby country were excellent.
On the third day, we visited a creek that some of the party had explored the year before. On that trip – at that time I had gone of with Chuin Nee to explore another creek (which turned out to have a very nice but short canyon). The others reported their creek had a long and very nice canyon in it. They also reported finding a bit of old sling caught in a log jam in the canyon – so, even though it is quite remote, at least one party had been down it before. I was keen to see this canyon.
It turned out to be quite nice. It was not particularly dark or narrow (my favourite canyons are like this) – but it was certainly long and sustained – and very deep. It had six abseils and some tricky climb downs. On one of these, Matt had a slip and damaged his ankle and had to sit out the next day.
Day four was another day of exploration. We started down a new creek, that was only reached after a particularly nasty scrubby ridge walk.
The canyon started with a huge drop. A two rope abseil into a narrow deep slot. But it ended not too far past this – turning back into a deep gorge before joining a larger creek.
We forced a steep pass out back onto the scrubby ridge. From the ridge we got a great view into the canyon we had been down the day before.
We were keen to avoid the scrub-bash back to the camp so we dropped down a side gully that took us into another large creek and followed it upstream.
I had been down this creek many year before, and knew it was a canyon further up. I also remembered that it had an abseil. Could we get up it? Rob thought we could. he too had been along that creek on an earlier visit. We did manage to climb out – but only after some good scrambling by Rik, who dropped a rope down to us, making our climb much easier up a greasy wall. This creek was quite a nice canyon – much better than I had remember it.
Day five – we started walking out. Matt show his toughness walking with a bad ankle and never complaining. In the afternoon, we left Matt and explored a creek nearby and found another very nice, but quite short, canyon.
On the last day of the trip, I walked out with Matt. The others headed off and explored a creek near where we had camped. They found a similar – nice, but short canyon. This seems to be typical of this part of the Blue Mountains.
More photos on my website here
And you can watch a short video of some of the canyons –