This is one of those trips which will be brought up in campfire discussions for years to come. “Remember that Canyon where we had to walk out in the dark with a couple of headlamps and a couple of crappy torches between 5 people?” Yeah…this canyon didn’t go exactly as planned.

Arethusa is a less well known and less travelled canyon than most around Katoomba. I’m not exactly sure why - my best guess is because the standard guide book ‘Canyons Near Sydney’ mentions it once being polluted, and so maybe that turns a lot of people off it. It could be argued that it is the difficult walk in and walk out that deters people - but that is only the case because so few people do it. If more people do it, then clear walking tracks will appear and the walk in and out will be pretty straight forward. So I’m not sure why more people don’t do it, but thats the way it is, and that is why there is no track leading into the canyon, and why there is no walking track out from the canyon.

That being the case, we found the directions we tried to follow from the Canyons Near Sydney book lead us to a pretty solid cliffline on the way into the canyon. So we decided to ditch those directions, and followed our own navigations from the Katoomba Topographical map. We picked a path down a ridgeline, down into a gully which met up with Katoomba Creek just under the high tension powerlines.

We followed Katoomba Creek for more than two and a half hours
before reaching the start of the main canyon, marked by an obvious abseil. Again the guidebook describes getting through Katoomba creek mostly dry as possible, but our experience was that we had to do several swims. I expect the water level was a little higher than normal, but I have trouble imagining staying dry throughout the 2+ hours spent in the creek.

We climbed up to a ledge on the right hand side above the abseil, and anchored from several slings wrapped around a decent sized tree. The start was a little difficult, but I dropped down first, and boy the bush bashing in and long walk through the creek was worth it just for this abseil. Dropping straight down into traditional blue mountain canyon alongside this awesome pumping waterfall. The waterfall was just awesome (see the photos…) and as I called “Off Rope!” down the bottom and stepped off from the small rock I was standing on, onto the sandy bottom, I got a bit of a fright as I sunk to my waist (seriously) in sand. I’ve sunk to my knees in light packed sand pleny of times, but never to my waist before.

Anyway, continuing on through the canyon was pretty standard fare - there was a lot of climbing down slippery rock surfaces (all of the rocks were very slippery actually. I guess regular traffic through most other canyons helps wear away the slippery mosses and algae etc that normally cover all of the rocks), and quite a few swims. There were very few jump ins because there were always large rocks just under the surface. Some of the climb downs were quite tricky and dangerous - high risk of twisted ankle mostly.

The end of the canyon came quickly enough (took us 1.5-2 hours to complete the main canyon) and we had some lunch atop the waterfalls (I think it was about 3:30pm, or maybe even 4:30pm at this point). We abseiled down Arethusa Falls and started climbing our way down the creek (large boulders, lots of negotiating a way through it all) to the small waterfall which marked our exit from the creek up to the cliffline.

We took our wetsuits off, rinsed the sand out of our shoes, and started the stupidly steep climb straight up to the cliffline. The path was occasionally there, regularly not, then after a short while of traversing along the cliffline, it simply ceased to exist. It was hard going as the ground was steeply falling away to the right constantl, we were walking on loose dirt/rocks/scree with very few plants around to either hold on to or to stabilise the dirt, and where there were plants, they were usually sharp, spiky, thorny plants which just made things unpleasant. (Lawyer Palms? Not sure if they were or not, but there was one particular type of vine with razor sharp thorns on it which liked to trip you over and cut your legs open at the same time)

We kept trudging along this damn cliffline for hours, forever certain that just around the next bed…surely Beauchamp Falls would be just there… but it just kept not happening. Bush bashing, on an uneven unstable ground, with a group of 5, makes the shortest distances take so much longer. This wall section was less than 2.5km, but it took us around 5 hours to get to Greaves Creek. After 3 it was obvious that nightfall was coming, and we started to lose group Morale. There was talk of setting up camp and waiting until morning. Where we could ’set up camp’ exactly was another problem in itself - there was not an inch of flat ground anywhere, and getting down from this cliffline presented its own set of problems - the further down you went, the steeper, rockier, and dodgier it got.

The simple fact was, that getting stuck on this hillside wasn’t an option, and we had to press on. It was obvious though, that the situation had destroyed morale - we had been walking for several hours, it wasn’t fun walking, it was uncomfortable and a few of us had already run out of water. The group was moving slower, fatigue was setting in, and as light was failing, the risk of accident was rapidly increasing.

I wanted to get down to the creek below us, because I knew that the other side of the creek was a walking track. A walking track would resolve all of our morale issues, and simply prove that we could make it out tonight. I picked a line down the hillside, always moving towards Beauchamp Falls, and managed to get incredibly lucky by finding myself at a point above the river which wasn’t too difficult to get down into the ankle deep water. I reached the creek bank just as it got so dark that I had to pull my headlamp out.

Rob had a headlamp, I had a headlamp and a spare mini LED torch, and trev had a small torch too - Ifound the route across the creek, then guided everyone across. Alan climbed up the other side, and immediately found the path - I can’t express in mere words just how incredibly super duper holy crap releived I was. Nightfall was breaking point. If we didn’t reach the creek just as night fell, there was a good chance we wouldn’t have been able to convince the group to keep moving. Reaching the creek was a good start, but if the track wasn’t immediately on the other side - if we had to climb up the ridge for several hundred meters or something stupid like that, it could have been just as bad. But there it was. We had the track, and we had enough light (sort of - 4 light sources, 5 people) to follow it. Only another 2 hours of walking uphill to go! And all of us out fo water…

The trip from there was otherwise uneventful. We filled up a bottle with some running water as a safety, but rationed out the last 500ml water which rob had between us occasionally. And walked our way back up Rodriguez Pass Walking track to the Grand Canyon Walking track, then onto Pilcher Trail, finally walking back to the car along the dirt road. We got out first bit of phone reception on Pilcher trail at 10:30pm, and got messages out to loved ones telling them that we were alive, not injured, and everything was fine - call off the resuce parties! We got back to the cars at about 11:20pm, and have never been happier to be at the end of a days canyoning.

Better yet, we even managed to drive the two hours home (we all live in Sydney) without falling asleep while driving!

See Also:

• Arethusa Canyon Guide Article
• Arethusa Canyon Trip Photo Album

I organised a trip through Claustral Canyon because I was constantly being pestered by people to do it. I had already done it four times, so wasn’t in a rush to do it again - even though it is right up there as one of, if not the best canyon in the mountains, I’d rather keep doing canyons I hadn’t done before. Nonetheless people wanted it, so I organised it, and before I had a chance to think about it, we had 6 people wanting to go and suddenly I was worried that we would get too many people in a canyon which has a very slow and cold choke-point that you don’t want to try to get through with a large group of people. To make it worse, I realised that it had been regularly raining, or at least constantly drizzling up in the mountains for at least 3 weeks by this point. So while the there had been no real rain over the 5 days or so leading up to our trip, there was also no chance for the water to really subside very much thanks to the constant cloud cover and drizzle.

Seeing as it hadn’t rained leading up to the day we went though, I didn’t call it off and the six of us went ahead anyway. We signed in to the new logbook - we were the fourth group in it I think. It was placed there by NPWS shortly after the recent fatality in the canyon only two weeks before our trip.

The walk down was straight forward enough, as was most of the first half of the canyon. I won’t spend long on the details of this trip because I think the photos and the video (to follow) do it far better than words, but a few things are worth mentioning. Firstly, the water level was higher than any of the other times I had done Claustral, although it was still far from dangerous. This did make things more interesting though, particularly the abseils which were flowing quite strongly and making a lot of noise. We had some difficulty on the abseil, but I will leave that story up to the video to tell.

One high point of the trip which I had never done before, was going for a short walk upstream at the Thunder Gorge junction. We dropped our packs and started heading upstream to see what was up there (I knew there was something of note, but couldn’t remember what). We reached a gigantic rock slab blocking the route which we could have probably climbed over, but I was starting to think it wasn’t worth it and that we should just head back - We were starting to get hungry and I knew that there was still a fair distance to cover.

Just as I was about ready to head back, Steven found a small tunnel to the left hand edge of the boulder. It was only about thigh height, and you had to wade in to water, but I was happy to send Steven in and let him clear out the innumerable spider webs that were blocking us… Luckily we did though, because inside that small tunnel was the coolest thing I had seen for a long time. First of all there was a narrow beam of sunlight which found its way in through all of the rocks and boulders and canyon walls above us, and it illuminated this narrow circle of water really nicely. But as soon as I passed through that beam of light the tunnel stopped and a larger cavern opened up, and as I stood up and looked around I was just blown away by the light show in front of me. The roof of this tiny cavern had the most brilliant glow worm decorations all over it. It was just so unexpected to see, in the middle of the day, at the end of this tiny little tunnel. Definitely worth checking out if you find yourself doing Claustral Canyon. Unfortunately it is all but impossible to take a photo of it, so you I can’t even show you how cool it was - you really will just have to go and see it yourself.

The whole canyon was incredibly beautiful though. Even having done it a few times before, it is still shocking to see the way the ferns glow just as you walk out from the bottom of Calcutta Falls. The way the sunlight occasionally illuminates the water drops falling in from above. The green-ness of the whole canyon. Always impressive.

Anyway, here is the video, see some of it for yourself!

See Also:

• Claustral Canyon Guide
• Claustral Canyon Photo Gallery

This video comes from KayakCanberra and has some really nice whitewater in it. Check out the rest of his videos, and have a lok at his website: kayakcanberra.com which is regularly updated. They are currently in New Zealand getting on to some incredible looking rivers.

Here is the video footage from Fortress Canyon. It is pretty short and focuses on the two jump ins. Enjoy!

See Also:

• Fortress Canyon Photo Gallery
• Fortress Canyon Guide Article
• Fortress Canyon Trip Report

We were planning on doing Arethusa Canyon, but as soon as we arrived at Katoomba it was thrown into doubt. It was raining and quite cold at the time and we hadn’t done Arethusa before, so were unsure how the weather may afffect the water levels. We had to get some gear so we dropped into Mountain Designs and while there asked the guy behind the desk his opinion - he indicated that it had been raining pretty consistently for two weeks at this point, so we decided to back out.

However, there were 4 of us up in the mountains - we had driven this far, surely there was something else we could do. That was when I decided that Fortress was an option - I have done Fortress Canyon before, and when I did it, it was flooded (very dangerously actually), so basically the conditions couldn’t be worse than what I had already done, and I know how to survive it in adverse conditions. Everyone else was keen to go, so off down Mount Hay road we headed.

There was another car parked in the Fortress Canyon parking space, so we weren’t going to be alone. We walked to the Fortress Ridge walking track, and were about to drop down to the end of the 4WD track (the entry that I know, not the standard one apparently) when we saw two guys walking back towards us along Fortress Ridge. Turns out they (Trev and Jon) had spent all morning trying to find their way in to the canyon without luck (it was very foggy and this was their first time). So we adopted them and our group grew to 6.

We walked down to the end of 4WD track and headed off into the bushes down a path towards the large gully
which eventually takes us all the way to the canyon. The water was flowing reasonably well, but it was certainly not flooding the canyon, like the last time I did Fortress. So we were able to easily walk along the track which followed the canyon the whole way down, occasionally needing to cross over the creek, or walk in it for short periods of time.

The whole canyon is pretty straight forward really. Walk in the creek, walk beside the creek, scramble over and down rocks until you reach the first jump in. Jump in. Swim for a while. More walking then Jump 6m shortly before the end. Reach exit, but continue down canyon to the big waterfall at the end.

We got to that waterfall, but unfortunately the fog completely blocked any concept of a view. Looked more like the end of the world or something - just like that movie, The Gods Must Be Crazy 2 I think it was, where he threw the Coke bottle off the end of the world. Anyway, walking up the steep hill out of the canyon was a bit of a slog, but then, it always is when canyoning.

In the end it was another successful trip, even in inclement weather - no injuries, back in good time, and a good time had by all.

See Also:

• Fortress Canyon Photo Gallery
• Fortress Canyon Guide Article
• Fortress Canyon Video Log