There was little traffic up to Mt. Tomah that morning coming down the M4. We made it into Katoomba pretty quick, then round and into the Bell Range ,where we met Shane and Julie waiting for us.

It was 8:30 on the dot, so this expedition was going to start on time.

After we logged into the Claustral visitors book, one car was left behind while we drove the others down the highway to Ranon’s entrance.

The path in was pretty much expected of the Blue Mountain bush, with no clear or well travelled path to be seen. We raced into the thick at top speed though, eagerly looking forward to the days activities.

After about 30mins, Julie the trail leader noted we had not vied far enough and we found our selves peering over a fairly high drop. Instead of backtracking and looking for the ‘traditional’ canyon entrance, we thought that our current location was as good as any from which to abseil in. In hindsight this was a great decision, as it turned out to be a fantastic abseil. So over we went. The abseil required a 60m rope, then the 35m and 50m tired together to see us down to the bottom. What an abseil – straight through the thick line of ferns buried into a mossy cliff face. We landed in ankle deep water; in some of the most amazing scenery I have ever experience. And that’s how the day started.

After another 45mins of level hiking though sometimes very narrow paths to fairly open paths, the water levels started increasing, so we decided to get into our wetsuits. We found a small waterfall to wet our appetite with, and took a few pics posing under it.

The next step was a 3m jump into a pool, then straight into a series of very narrow corridors.

The first proper abseil of the canyon was straight forward 15m into a pretty deep pool, which led onto another narrow corridor. Though this was the first time doing this canyon for us (Jon and Trev), we were told by the more experienced canyoners in the group, that water levels were much higher than normal, due to recent rainfalls. This meant there was a significant amount or water pumping over all the abseils we did, possibly increasing the difficulty, but definitely increasing the fun!

I have heard many theories why this canyon is named the way it is. I reckon it’s because of the flow of the land - everything just ran-on beautifully from the previous landscape.

The second abseil was brilliant, Julie scaled down and waited in the pool at what we thought was the bottom – but the canyon lived up to its name and the descents just kept on running. This was just a temporary deep pool, which required us to swim across before attempting the second half of the abseil. Immediately after this there was yet another 25 abseil to navigate, all whilst the water whirled around us and roared in our ears as it tumbled down into each successive pool.

At the bottom of this series of abseils, Ranon runs into Claustral canyon, just down from the black hole of Calcutta. Shane took Trev and Jon a little bit upstream to the bottom of the hole, since we had not done Claustral before, and it allowed us to get a feel for the eerie enchanting beauty of the darkened natural hallways of Claustral.

At this stage we went a little further before finding a small sand beach, where we stopped for lunch and ate while admiring the contrasting landscape and scenery all around us. After lunch, we again took a quick detour to see something special. Shane led us into some small darkened caves, which required us to slither through some narrow gaps, before looking up in the darkness to see a mass of beautiful blue glow worms all around us!

We headed towards the exit after this, navigating and scrambling over and around rocks for another hour or so. There were a few swims, as well as some challenging hand-over-hand descents and jumps, which kept the adrenalin pumping until the very end.

The hike out took us approximately and hour and a half. We discovered that leeches are attracted to Shane like bees to honey, as several of them decided to hitch a ride up the mountain on his legs.

We returned to our cars at approximately 5pm, exhausted after a long day’s canyoning, but elated after having a fantastic day out, in which a good time was had by all!

By Trevor and John

See Also:

• Ranon Canyon Photo Gallery
• Ranon Canyon Guide Article

…or, as Jamieson puts it in Canyons Near Sydney 4th Edition ‘Upper Bowens Creek South Branch’. I think we need a real name for this canyon, because that is just annoying. Jamiesons guide also has ‘Bowens Creek North Branch, Lower Section’, which I have heard several people call “Gobsmacker Canyon” (not mentioned in Jamiesons guide). I think we need a real ‘name’ for all of the other sections of Bowens creek too…

Anyway, this canyon was number two of the weekend after doing Yileen the day before. The weather was pretty bad. Not heavy rain, but drizzling nearly the whole time. We were soaked through before we even reached the creek thanks to brushing past thoroughly wet shrubs. Cate wasn’t happy about the weather and canyon combination, but the water level wasn’t high at all, and usually drizzle isn’t a problem - it’s the thunderstorms and sudden downpours that are problematic!

Anyway, we managed to do pretty much every potential abseil in this canyon, even though most of them can be walked around in one way or another. We were expecting a pretty long day, but it didn’t take long to get to the main couple of abseils and find ourselves at Corkscrew canyon. We came out into the Sassafras forest and started to wonder if we were near the end already. A quick check of the book told us that we had another rough section through some boulders before another canyon section.

The end of the boulder section was actually really interesting, as you had to pick a route down climbing through a number of large boulders. They were tight squeezes and required some path picking. Of course, you could just abseil over the top if you wanted, but that would be less fun! That brought us into the last canyon section, with more beautiful narrow sections, dropping into pools, and a large log slide.

We were shortly at Hobnail canyon (entering from the right) and looking out for the exit path on the right hand side of the canyon. I saw one section which wasn’t a sheer cliff, but it was still …well…almost a sheer cliff, so I kept walking. However one of the guys called me back and said that he thinks it was the exit path, as described in the guidebook. So we had a closer look, and sure enough there was a tree leading up a few meters, and what could almost be called a path above it. So we followed it. There was definitely a path-like thing there, but the climbing was on slippery dirt…on an almost vertical wall. It isn’t an exit path which I imagine many people could use because each person would wear away on the plants you are basically standing on and climbing up.

I’m still not sure if this is the actual exit described in Jamiesons guide or not (because it is a very accurate match of what he said), however I have since heard that there is an easier (better) one further downstream. Anyway, this one led us up to the first cliff line where we did notice that the path there did go further downstream than where our path met it…. We followed the cliff line, found the narrow ‘caving-like’ climb up a corner tunnel (very slippery clay), then a track to another short easy rock climb up, then around to another higher but easier rock climb (with a hand line there too).

The fire trail wasn’t much further up the hill, and a bit of a walk back along it saw us back at the car just in time for the heavens to really open up and starting dumping an awful lot of water on us. So much so that we found it almost impossible to get changed into dry clothes and get into the cars…

We were planning on camping another night and doing another canyon on the Monday, but the amount of rain we were seeing made the prospects of another canyon on the following day unlikely, so we called it a weekend and headed home.

See Also:

• Upper Bowens Creek South Branch Guidebook Article
• Upper Bowens Creek South Branch Photo Gallery

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