Rob, Jake and I were planning on doing Water Dragon canyon sometime during the week, so when Rowan posted on the OzCanyons Yahoo group asking if anyone was available to canyon on the Wednesday, I offered our trip through Water Dragon because I like to meet new people and a group of 4 is better than a group of 3.

We met at the Mount Wilson fire shed at 9am, chatted and got to know each other while we organised our gear, then headed off down the fire trail to the Wollangambe One exit track. We climbed down to the ‘gambe, walked across the reasonably low water level and up the incredibly steep hill on the other side. It was a stinking hot day, and the climb up the hill really hurt at that temperature. We got to the top and followed the single track path along the ridge which would eventually take you to the start of Whungee-Wheengee if you followed it the whole way. Instead we turned off to the left about half way along it down a pseudo-path which quickly faded into nothing. We basically scrub bashed our way down to the creek, then followed the small creek down into the main creek (which Jake and I managed to head up the wrong direction without even realising it).

Once in the main creek it wasn’t a long walk until we reached the first hand line into a wading pool. We stopped above this for lunch, then climbed down and waded through, not yet bothering to put on wetsuits because the day was so warm and we weren’t actually swimming yet. There was still a bit of walking to go before we reached the first abseil which was down a tricky climb down. We rigged up the rope over a huge dead log and negotiated the tricky start (made tricky by the dead branches sticking out over the edge which tended to wedge the rope).

Once down the bottom of the first abseil, we were really into the canyon. Rowan and I went pretty snap happy and took a whole bunch of photos between us as we approached the second abseil. The second abseil was at the other end of a deep pool, so we finally put our wetsuits on, climbed down the hand line into the pool and swam across to the anchor point - a collection of small sticks wedged into the water flow…not very confidence inspiring stuff as you put your entire body weight over the edge of this most hairy of abseil starts. It is actually one of the most tricky abseil starts I have done because the sticks are at ledge level, so you have to get your waist down below the ledge before your weight is caught by your descender, and the abseil is down a slippery waterfall with nothing to hold onto. You have to lower yourself down off the edge as you would lower yourself off the side of a brick wall, and then somehow transfer yourself to the rope… Well, its hard to look graceful while doing it anyway. And everyone knows that this sport is all about grace.

Once at the bottom there were a whole lot more photos taken in the very dark halls of the underbelly of Water Dragon canyon, some really nice photos coming out of it. Once at this point of the canyon though, there wasn’t much left. We walked for a few minutes through the narrow section until it opened up a bit, then a bit more into a rainforest environment shortly before meeting back up with the Wollangambe.

Just like Geronimo the week before, and Whungee-Wheengee before it, the water of the Wollangambe was a good deal warmer than the water in the narrow slot canyon and you just want to bask in its warmth for a while. We stopped and had a second lunch opposite the exit from Water Dragon before moving on.

Only 100m down the river though, I noticed that my camera wasn’t in my pocket. Very ungood. No one else seemed to have it, so it must have been back where we had lunch. I swam back up stream - it wasn’t there. I swam back and forth two or three times between where I noticed it missing and the lunch spot trying to look down to the bottom to see if I could see it. No luck. I climbed up out of the water onto the edge to see if I could get a better view from there - I couldn’t. It was then that the Canyon Gods decided to smile upon me in a way that they have never smiled down upon someone before. I heard voices upstream. I saw people upstream. I jumped back into the water and swam up to them (I think this confused them a great deal), and asked the most odd question I could think of asking someone in a canyon - “You don’t happen to have a snorkel and set of goggles on you do you?”.

They did. Apparently taking goggles into the Wollangambe is a normal thing to do (I hadn’t thought of it before - but it makes sense to me now). They had two sets and were happy to lend them to us (happy that I didn’t ask them for a first aid kit or Epirb to rescue a dying friend apparently) so I threw one over to Rob and took the other and started swimming. It only took a few minutes to find it with the goggles, and I had to duck dive down to at least 4m depth (causing great pain to my inner ear) in order to pick the camera up. Happily, it still worked! (only rated to 3m)

*very happy*

Anyway, with that little drama sorted out, we proceeded down the canyon to the end, did the usual de-wetsuiting, the usual uphill walking, and eventually got back to the car before it even started to rain (the thunderstorm which hit us on the drive home though, made it almost impossible to see the road!)

A good canyon, an eventful day, and good company.

Shane

See Also:

• Water Dragon Canyon guide notes
• Water Dragon Canyon photo gallery

Here is the Geronimo Canyon video, followed by a trip report written by Rob Luikens:

Having wasted days and nights eating and drinking with family and friends to usher in the new year, it was high time we grabbed our gear and went off to do something fun. We hadn’t heard any first hand feedback on this canyon, but the book described Geronimo Canyon as a great canyon, and that’s more than enough for us.

We left our cars at the fire shed at about 10:30 and walked down to the Wollangambe. We missed our turn off and ended up a bit far downstream. Thankfully, it was fairly easy to find our way back to where we were meant to be. A short walk over a saddle and we were on the correct ridge. At 1:30, we made it to the first abseil. We stopped for a sandwich, and Shane made friends with an exceptionally inquisitive skink, who seemed to love tuna in sweet chilli sauce and was willing to risk life and limb to get some.

Then came the first abseil. I wasn’t anything too difficult, but you have to be careful recovering the rope. The start of the canyon is quite pretty, and has lots of little fish swimming in it. Excited, the group continued on. After about 10 minutes of high canyon walls and Lost World type scenery, we reached the jump in that gives the canyon its name. I abseiled down and checked it out. Once I’d cleared it Shane and Jake jumped down. Both came out screaming about how cold the water was. Even at this time of year it’s pretty chilly in there. A couple more minutes of swimming and scrambling and we were at the next abseil. It wasn’t what I’d call a difficult abseil, more like irritating. The rope got covered in mud making it slow going. The ground was mossy making it hard to get a good footing. After that, it was another fairly short walk and scramble until we hit the Wollangambe. We had a well earned soak in the river, got out of our wetsuits, and began the 2 hour odd stroll back to the car.

Not a bad day all in all. The canyon gets its grade 4 more from being slippery and sometimes tricky that extremely physically demanding. It’s nowhere near as demanding as say Claustral. I wouldn’t call it one of my all time greats, but it was a good, albeit rather short day.

Rob Luikens

See Also:

• Geronimo Canyon Guide Article
• Geronimo Canyon Photo Gallery

Finally, the Arethusa mis-adventure trip in video format! Sorry for taking so long, but I’ve been hectic since New Years and been doing a few trips which stop me from being able to do my computer based work! Damn those outdoor experiences getting in the way of me working on my computer!

Anyway, here it is…

See Also:

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

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