Claustral Canyon Trip Report and Video
Monday, December 24th, 2007
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!
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