In Search of The Folly #1

This is an unpublished canyon, I can’t say where it is, and  wont give out its name, but it received a bit of attention when a certain person published a You Tube video of finding it.   I thought, “how hard can it be” to triangulate on where it should be given the hints in the video.  Well, seems it’s actually quite hard!

Some of the A Team (Trish N, Heather R & Geoff S) signed on for the adventure, plus some friends from MSS (Rod S, Beth L and Andre).  I guess they thought I had some inside knowledge (not), or maybe they were just willing to give it a go.  So, we chose the most logical creek system based on the hints and then chose the most logical side creek and in we went.

There was a lot of scouting around to find the best way down through the pagodas, and then we felt that we were on the right track when we came to a creek that actually went over a small drop, so, we took a look at it and decided that even though Andre could down climb it, we’d be knocking off nice bits of moss along the way, and we’d have no easy way of retreating so we put a rope down and abseiled to the bottom.

You had to go through a small slot to get to the drop and there were shrubs and native grasses all over the place (getting in the way).

The abseil down was about 5m, maybe less and there was a small pool at the bottom, and then there was 5m of actual canyon (constriction).

We got to the end of the constriction and beyond that was nothing other than a small ledge, a tree or two and a cliff.

Leaving the rope in place on the first pitch, just in case our  40m rope didn’t reach the bottom on the next pitch we set up our 2nd 40m rope on a tree on the edge of the ledge and Andre went down first.  He was the youngest and fittest and if someone had to prussic back up because the rope wasn’t long enough, it may as well be him!  When he got down and gave the thumbs up, we retrieved the 1st rope and I tied the two ropes together and redeployed them, ready for the rest of us to go down on a double 9mm rope.

The tree we used as an anchor was pretty dodgy in hindsight, if I could have backed it up I would have but there was absolutely nothing there, not even a rock.  Anyway, we all did the abseil, it was a nasty start (so close to the edge), but the abseil itself was pretty spectacular.  Rod was the last one down and brought the knot over the edge to make the rope retrieval easier.  Turns out it was pretty close to a 35m abseil, just what was indicated in the YouTube video, had we found the canyon?

We walked downstream to the spur I’d chosen as our exit.  The first half of the creek was very scrubby, half went high up at the cliff-line, the rest of us stayed in the creek, head-high ferns all around us, and Beth at the back gave a shriek when she encountered a snake.

That was enough for me, as soon as we came across some trees that you could walk on, I was up out of the scrub.  Luckily there were a few of these trees and we were soon across the other side and starting up this great spur that I’d identified as our way out.  We did look across from time to time and thought that if what we did wasn’t Bell’s Folly, then we picked out other likely contenders, but we’d have to go in to make sure.  After climbing to the top we were then in known country and the rest of the walk out was easy as.

So, I got back home and fired up the YouTube, compared my photos, and no, we hadn’t found the canyon (alluded to as The Folly to thwart Google), and the canyon we did fine, whilst fun doing the exploration wasn’t worthwhile ever doing again, and in fact, I would recommend anyone doing it, that anchor was just too iffy!

Back to the drawing board then, we’ll have to check out the other tributaries of the creek!