ALCATRAZ CANYON – APRIL 2016
I had decided that I just wasn’t up to mountain biking to the start of another canyon in the Northern Wollemi with the guys, too much potential for me to break something, so, I planned an exploratory trip down Alcatraz with Aine and Colin G, none of us had done it before, how hard could it be? 
We met up on the Glow Worm Tunnel Road and headed over to the western/northern side of the road, where the old prison farm used to be and why this canyon is called Alcatraz (they must have had them planting pine trees in the pine forest). The roads over there are like a maze, but with the aid of the trusty GPS and a good map we managed to get on the right road. We parked the cars and headed off, after a half hour walking Colin brought out his new edition map and we compared it to my old edition map, his showed far more roads, and we weren’t on the right one. So, we backtracked to the cars, by this time it was getting hot so I took off my thermal and threw it in the car (big mistake there), we hopped back in and drove a mere 50m up the road to another (less used) fire trail. This turned out to be the right one.
There is a track of sorts which goes down from the road to the cliff-line, and there were foot-pads of sorts all over the place, we walked in the direction we thought we should go and checked the map from time to time. Seemed like we were heading the right way, animal pads all over the place, so couldn’t be sure we were on a track to the canyon or not. We went to the cliff edge again and checked around and decided that we had to go just a little bit further and skirt around the cliff to what looked like a “natural bridge”. 
This turned out to be where we should be and we just skirted around a pagoda and voila! there was our little creek.
We started to put our harnesses on, we hadn’t brought wetsuits, there was only one pool and it was a nice sunny day, it was then I realised that the thermal I had intended wearing in the pool was back in the car, all I had on were thermal bottoms and a cotton t-shirt, really dumb (you’d think I was a novice!).
Anyway, it was only one abseil, maybe I could keep dry-ish! Aine set up the ropes and headed down, it was a wonderful spiral down into a large chamber, filled with water (waist deep), she stayed in the pool to belay Colin and me. I was second and as soon as I got down I headed for the “letterbox” exit from the pool, not realising that the way I went wasn’t waist deep but over my head, ah well, wet is wet.
This abseil has to be one of the best waterfall abseils that I’ve done in a while, I think I’d like to go back in a wetsuit and really enjoy the water pummelling you as you go down (mind you don’t really want to carry a wet wetsuit out!)
Colin was soon down and we started walking downstream, I took the wet route on a cascade and lost traction and slid right to the bottom into a manky pool! We regrouped and made our way to a sunny spot for lunch. We then walked around the cliff-line to a likely looking gully off to the left. Whilst it looked as though you should go right to the end of the gully, there was a better route over to the right of the gully, took us up onto a series of pagodas and before we knew it, we were at the top of the cliffs and were actually in the spot that we were a couple of hours ago, looking for the way in.
The one and only abseil but it’s truly spectacular and well worth the trip.
It’s a dead easy walk back to the vehicles, really only a half day canyon, but well worth the trip.