Canyons and Bushbashing on a Blue Mountains Adventure

There isn't much canyoning down in Tasmania, and I'd only done it twice (both times entirely accidentally) on my home isle before moving to Canberra. The first time, I wound up on top of a cliff wishing I had a rope I could use to get to the bottom and ended up shimmying down a tree. The second was a 1:1 gradient quartzite stream that I descended while wearing walking boots and a 25kg pack. With such promising beginnings in the sport, it's small wonder I wanted to try canyoning with people who know what they're doing.

On the March long weekend this year, I ventured up into the Blue Mountains with a group of ANUMC bushwalkers, mountain-bikers, rockclimbers and canyoneers. While I spent most of the weekend bushwalking, I did take a day off to don my wetsuit, five-fingers and helmet then proceed to jump and slide my way down Twister and Rocky Creek canyons. I discovered, in that one activity, something that tested several of my phobias: claustrophobia, acrophobia and nyctophobia. Now if you don't handle fear the way I do, I can understand why you'd think this meant I didn't enjoy myself. Actually, I loved it. Pitching myself against things that terrify me has thus far proved an effective way of becoming less terrified of them afterwards and enjoying myself while I'm at it.

So I signed up to the next canyoning trip I could join, which promised a nice 60m abseil to put my acrophobia to the test. I donned wetsuit, volleys, helmet and harness and prepped myself for the terror. It was annoyingly easy, thanks to some wide ledges breaking up the descent, but I knew I'd find more canyons to terrify me later.Fast forward to October, and a three day canyoning trip up to the Blue Mountains. Five of us set off for the mountains (five came back as well, in case you were wondering) on Friday evening, bound for a campsite at the promisingly named Barcoo Swamp, which we hoped would be quiet over the long weekend. It turned out to be a pleasant, well-drained campsite and made for a good night's sleep before our first canyon.

The plan was to do Heart Attack*, a "dry" canyon boasting 35 and 40m abseils, and a lot of wading up to waist deep. It also boasts a 16km round trip of walking between the car and canyon. The track to the canyon was pretty distinct for the most part, being an old 4WD trail given over to bushwalkers. "For the most part" omits the off-track section at the end. We descended toward the canyon edge, searching for the promised scrub-bash that would skirt around the 40m cliffs we'd otherwise have to abseil. Alas, said cliffs failed to provide their promised easier way around. We searched back and forward along the clifftops, finding numerous gullies that terminated in cliffs and trees solid enough to be used as abseil anchors, provided we knew that they would land us in the right area.

Eventually, we worked our way along the canyon rim to where we knew we could abseil down. Even with GPS coordinates to guide us, it took us some time to find the official anchor—in part because the coordinates we had skipped four out of the ten digits, or around ±70m accuracy, but mostly because we'd been looking for a more substantial anchor. With a 40m abseil ahead, we were checking every sizeable tree along the clifftop for old slings that would give it away as the abseiling anchor. When we found it, it turned out to be a burnt out hollow stump. Already into the afternoon after our explorations, and faced with a dubious anchor, we made our way back to the car rather than risk being stuck in the bottom of a canyon when night fell.

After a warm day pushing our way through dry scrub without finding our destination, everyone was pretty keen for an easily accessed wet canyon on day two. Our canyon of choice was Death Trap. It was only a few km from camp, and a quick scout the night before showed pretty easy walking through open bush. None of us had done it before, and followed a GPS to the promised start-point. The stream wasn't wide enough to wade, but was pretty easily followed down to where it was.

It turned into a canyon eventually, but even the stream was pretty.

A series of pools made up the upper extents of the canyon, entered by short slides or jumps. One pool, draining via a tunnel in to its neighbour, would have been extremely difficult to climb out of at low water levels and was a possible explanation for a pretty canyon receiving such an ominous name. It isn't a long canyon, and we soon reached the abseil down a waterfall into the last pool.

Not steep enough for comfort.

Something I've had to come to terms with in canyoning is that steeper is easier. Abseiling down a slope is more difficult by far than down a vertical rockface, itself more difficult than an overhang. While acrophobia makes those nice sloping rock faces look more appealing than a cliff, it's actually much easier not to slip and fall if your feet aren't touching anything. This waterfall was unfortunately sloped, requiring the odd stretch of bum-sliding mid abseil, but  the pool at the bottom was glorious and worth the awkward access route.

From the pool, we walked along a broad canyon bordered by sheer cliff faces. There was no way to climb out yet and we pressed down further. Part of the cliff had collapsed, not providing a way up but almost completely blocking the canyon. The "almost" was a slot not much than shoulder width between the fallen rock and the opposite wall. It descended under the rocks, from where a short tunnel brought us back into sunlight. We wandered further, taking in the glorious canyon while looking for a break in the cliffs.

The only way to escape Death Trap is down.

 Soon we found ourselves walking on a path that zig-zagged its way up through the cliffline. The path vanished into obscurity as soon as we hit the top, but there was no mistaking it when we stumbled onto it after a few hundred metres of bushbashing. Wide, well-walked and running straight along the ridgeline, it led to within 300m of our car before veering abruptly. We waved it goodbye, clambered into the car and made for the second canyon of the day, as compensation to ourselves for failing Heart Attack on day 1.

Twister was as fun and even easier than I remembered it, with plenty of jumps, slides and swims along its short but convoluted length. The most dramatic part of the canyon is the final drop, a waterfall with a catch. The pool at the bottom of the canyon is little over ankle deep and no saviour at all for a jump. Instead we jumped into a deep pool halfway down the cliff, and used a handline to descend from there. Scouting for anything recently washed into the pool was the only difficulty, and our leader abseiled the short drop to check for submerged branches. Many groups don't bother checking jumps if they've done a canyon before but—coming from a whitewater background where rapids change with every flood—I was glad we took more precautions. We never encountered surprise submerged branches, but it would have only taken one...

We had considered doing Rocky Creek as well, bringing our day's total to three canyons, but the consensus at the exit track was to head back to camp rather than doing another canyon in the encroaching dark. Although the day had been warm earlier, it wasn't any more and no one was inclined to change out of wetsuits for the steep track out of the canyon.

Our last day of the trip took us to another new canyon for the group, Tigersnake. It was a dry canyon and we swapped wetsuits for quick-dry pants before setting off. The access track was an easily followed fire-trail for most of the way, then a well-walked trail for the rest. Unfortunately we had some old notes for the canyon that included instructions of where to turn off the track and descend toward the first abseil. These instructions proved somewhat outdated and the branch at the promised location led us through what turned out to be an entirely unnecessary bushbash and climb before simply rejoining the track we'd been on. No harm—beyond a few scratches and losing half an hour—done and we would know for next time. There certainly will be a next time.

Down into the canyon.

Tigersnake canyon starts with an abseil down through the narrow roof of the canyon. Its a short descent made tricky by the close confines, and some choose to climb down instead. From there, beautiful grottos and a short descent lead to one of the dodgiest anchors you could ever hope not to trust with your weight. A pile of what amounts to old kindling had been wedged across the canyon and roped together. Closer examination revealed that most of it didn't touch either side, let alone both, and was likely the broken remnants of earlier anchors simply left in place. We put in a backup anchor and abseiled in descending order of weight, the last removing the backup before her abseil.

Not a reassuring anchor...

The anchor held, but flexed and creaked alarmingly. From here our nice dry canyon included a wade through a shallow pool before a short abseil to the top of the main drop, a 17m cliff, 10m of which is an overhang. Now I reiterate that cliffs are easier to abseil than slopes, but I was still awash with a nice gentle buzz of terror as I roped up. I failed to fall, failed to die and the worst part of the descent was that my canyoning harness was a whole lot less comfortable than the nice padded climbing harness I had chosen to leave at home. Durability be damned, next time I'm choosing padding.

A short walk through forest brought us to a choice between another long abseil, or a short and tricky abseil down into a second stretch of glorious twisting canyon. We chose the latter.

One of the only photos that didn't blur
in Tigersnake's gloom.

The abseil starts from on top of a chockstone, which was disturbingly prone to shifting slightly underfoot. There were a few joking references to Aron Ralston, but a second (far more secure) chockstone beneath it meant it couldn't actually fall, just threaten. The abseil dropped straight into thigh-deep water (dry canyons, it seems, aren't dry at all) that smells like it doesn't get much flow to flush it clean. We moved on quickly, and into a series of level-floored cathedral-like chambers linked by twisting passages carved into the rock. The divide between caving and canyoning can be slight at times, and there were a few places where the sky vanished from overhead to cast the spectacular rocks into gloom.

Emerging from the end into open canyon once more, we quickly found the exit track and started making our way back to the car and from there back to camp. There our weekend hit a sour note, with the discovery of the piles of garbage—cans, beer bottles, vegetable scraps, even meat and cheese—that the residents of the neighbouring campsite had left in their wake. Our car already laden with five people, we had enough of a challenge loading our own gear and garbage and couldn't fit a bag or ten of theirs in as well. It made for an unfortunate end to the weekend, a reminder of the attitudes some Australians have toward the bush that stayed with us on the long drive home.

If you're interested in another viewpoint on the weekends adventuring, not to mention some spectacular photos, check out the post on Jessica Hancock's blog.

* Named, not for any property of the canyon, but because the party that explored it was woken up by someone trying to get help for someone having a heart attack.