DHARUG NATIONAL PARK – 12 September 2022
I’ve been eyeing off this creek for about 6 months now, even put it on the Club Calendar as a short notice day walk – thankfully no-one put their hand up to do it! I imagined a lovely creek, in amongst a beautiful shady myrtle forest that “we’d just wander down”, well, I got about 100m of the myrtle forest but the rest of the creek was a full body workout!
John was free for a Monday day walk, so I suggested this unnamed creek and we set off.
We accessed the headwaters of the creek, and from the beginning (that I’d crossed before), it looked really good, I had visions of it being a bit like this for most of the way. It was flowing very well which shouldn’t have been surprising as there was a good 1.5k of creek upstream that (on the map) looked like it was a hanging swamp (releases lots of water after rain)
The scrub was a bit untidy, although before long we found ourselves at a small waterfall into a deep pool, this is starting to look very promising – and was only 100m or so from where we’d started.
We could hear another waterfall, but couldn’t see all that much of it so headed into some scrub.
We found ourselves at the top of a 2 tiered 15+m waterfall that we definitely couldn’t climb down and my small handline wasn’t going to be any use, so we set off to get to the bottom by a circuitous scrubby route.
Into the scrub.
At the bottom of the waterfall, not all that impressive and no big pool, mind you the first tier above was probably another 4m or so – from up there it would have looked better.
John, invisible in the scrub getting down to the base of the waterfall, I took a different route through some dead trees, much easier.
The waterfall from further downstream. Many of the trees in the foreground had the tops of them broken off, I’m guessing that when we had that horrific rain event a few months back, the force of the water going over the waterfall broke the tops off the trees. Would have been impressive to see.
After the waterfall it was simply a matter of negotiating our way downstream, avoiding small drops, climbing over boulders and avoiding slippery rocks. This section was particularly pretty.
“I think we can get down this way” says John, my legs aren’t nearly as long as his!
Nice easy section of creek, rocks weren’t too moss covered and not too many boulders.
The creek closed in and would have been time consuming in it, so we headed up on the bank, nice campsite here (shame it’s a pain to get to).
Really easy walking up on the bank now.
And here’s our 100m of lovely myrtle forest!
At about here, we decided to exit up a very steep bank, about 100m straight up in very snaky country. Once at the top, the car was a mere 100m down the fire trail, how good was that!
I have to say, I’m really happy that I didn’t bring anyone else down this creek, it was pretty in places but not really the type of creek you’d drive for an hour to get to and then drag a bunch of people down it, not really enough bank for one’s bucks! I guess this makes a good case for doing recces! Mind you, the wildflower display was impressive!
A big thank you to John for coming on this exploratory walk with me, crossed another one off the wish list – and it’s always good to do something when you have no idea what to expect.