Visiting mountain regions a fair bit has allowed me to observe an array of beautiful atmospheric optical phenomena. These can be present when you get sunlight and mist or clouds. You need to be lucky and observant to see them.
Brocken spectre and glory on Mt Geryon, Tasmania
The “PBT” is the SUBW President’s Bludge Trip to the Kowmung River on the October long weekend. The first PBT was in 1974 and they have been held every October long weekend since.
This year there were a number of challenges. Firstly the president, Helen had been injured on a cross country ski trip not long before and this meant she could only walk short distances. This problem was solved buy the trip this year going to that part of the river near Tuglow Caves. This meant she could get in by 4WD. Most of there rest of the party walked to the river via a variety of routes. A nice campsite was chosen not far downstream of the ford. Continue reading
The Blue Breaks is part of the Southern Blue Mountains wilderness contained between the Coxs and Wollondilly arms of lake Burragorang. It is a great area for bushwalking. It offers a sense of remoteness and it is rugged. To walk there requires careful navigation and route finding. It is also a very spectacular place.
On the Mittagong to Katoomba walk back in July, I had been hoping to go via the Blue Breaks – but we encountered very windy weather. Not a good time to be scrambling on the tops! This past week was my next opportunity – and together with Tim and Peter from SUBW, we completed a very nice walk. We had hoped to traverse both Bimlow Tableland and Broken Rock Range – but bad weather limited us to a visit of the latter. But this allowed us to spend a longer time on the beautiful Kowmung River. Continue reading
This year we seemed to go from winter to summer without spring. The weather forecast was for hot weather on the weekend – so a group of us headed out along a dirt road in the Northern Blue Mountains in search of some nice canyons.
At the end of the road we shouldered our packs, walked down a valley for a while and then climbed out onto a plateau. This provided us access to our first canyon. None of us had been down it before. A few years earlier some of us had gone down a different branch – and that was a very fine canyon indeed. This time we chose to enter via a different tributary. It turned out to be a good canyon with about 6 abseils.
The Gardens of Stone is a superb natural area on the western side of the Blue Mountains. Part of the area is protected by national park but a lot of it is not. Our weekend visit took us to places in the national park and places out of it.
It is a good area for canyoning, and in particular, a good place for canyoning at this time of the year as many of the canyons are dry. This was just as well – for we had a quite cool weekend. Low temperatures and a strong icy wind. In between the canyons, we camped on the rim of the Wolgan Valley. This provided great views and plenty of photo opportunities amongst the delicate rock formations on top of the cliffs. Continue reading
The funding for the Greenway – the cycleway and walkway connecting the Cooks River with Iron Cove was cut from the recent state budget. This is a very disappointing and short sighted decision.
The light rail project will go ahead and it makes a lot of sense to construct the Greenway at the same time as it uses the same corridor.
The Friends of the Greenway have produced a video with more information –
Thompson’s Point at Nowra is one of the best sports climbing crags around. It is a very popular winter climbing area. Well winter had just finished, but it wasn’t too warm to still climb there. Four of us (Chuin Nee, John, Su Li and myself) spent the weekend there. On Saturday we were joined by Albert and Col, and on Sunday John’s sister Gab joined us for some climbs.
Here are a few pictures of the climbing –
This time the trail was open. Rob and myself were on the way back from Berrima and we met Chris, Clare and Andrew at Mt Annan for a few loops of the mountain biking trails.
There were lots of other riders there, but the trails are long enough that there are no traffic jams – as riders are generally well spread out. The only problem was a dive bombing magpie. It swooped down and dive-bombed Chris and Andrew on the first loop and me on the third loop. Another rider told us it dived on him on the first three of his four loops.
It was the weekend to go to Ted’s party at Berrima. Rob was going and I suggested to him that it may be worth taking down bikes and doing a ride or two on the way down. At Mittagong we called in to the tourist office and got a pamphlet showing rides at Bundanoon and a free map showing the trails nearby at Welby, a suburb of Mittagong.
Welby was only a few minutes away and it seemed a good choice to start off our riding. The trails start at the Welby Cemetery and have been built and maintained by the Southern Highlands Cycling Club. As well as the free map at the tourist office, they have an online map here. We were able to follow the track without difficulty. At present white arrows and orange tapes mark sections of the trail and we followed them in a direction opposite to that shown on the map (following the white arrows). The trail is good fun and provides some great mountain biking. It is not too technical – perhaps similar to the Appin Circuit. It is mainly single track with short sections of fire trail. The combined section of the trail total about 8.6 km.
The Greenway is an important project that will improve cycling in the inner west of Sydney. This will be an off-road cycling and walking route in the corridor of the light rail track that is being worked on now between Haberfield and Dulwich Hill. It makes sense to complete the Greenway at the same time as the light rail track is being built.
However, there are rumours that the funding for it will be cut from the state budget in September. Read more about it on the Friends of the Greenway website. They have links where you can take more action as does the blog of Greens MP Cate Faehrmann
