[SUBW-A] trip report- canyon 25-26 march

[adeb0232 at mail.usyd.edu.au]

Trip Report- Claustral/ King Georges/ Explorers Brook Canyon

Party- Amy and me (Alex)

First I would like to say that I hope that this doesn't freak out our new 
members to much and to let them know that this sort of thing doesn't happen very 
often (Mitch and Rog), although if I don't get many people coming on my trips in 
the future, I will understand why.

We headed up along the Bells Line of Road on Monday morning after meeting up at 
the North Richmond bakery. Before we got too far it began to drizzle and then 
rain fairly heavily and by this point we had decided not to do Claustral Canyon 
as was originally planned. Instead we decided to head to King Georges Canyon out 
near Mt Banks, expecting it not to be effected much by the rain.

My recollection of exact details are a bit hazzy so Amy feel free to correct 
me. Anyway, we headed off in a light drizzle which continued for the rest of 
the day. We soon left the fire road into the scrub and came across what we 
thought was our canyon but should have been suspect when the tributary we were 
on entered the main creek in a waterfall. We headed east and found the next 
tributary did the same and found a way down further on. We followed this creek 
for a 
while then came to another fall, so headed back up onto the ridge and headed 
further downstream. On the ridge we came across a 2m big arrow made of stones 
poiting downstream, right next to a pair of very crusty running shoes??? After a 
while we re-entered what we thought was King Georges Brook via a 
very slippery and steep gully. Here we saw a ring tail possum perched very 
precariously on the end of a frond of a large tree fern.

We headed down the canyon which was fairly pleasant with a few wades, two short 
swims and some montrous yabbies. After lunch in a dry overhang we headed 
downstream for about another hour and came across a waterfall which we couldn't 
negotitate. We hadn't brought any abseil gear seeing as our intended 
canyon did not call for any. It was about now that we became fairly suspect. We 
decided we had over shot our exit gully and gone to far downstream to the point 
where King Georges is meant to enter Explorers Brook in two abseils. We headed 
back upstream and exited via a gully onto what we thought was Banks Ridge. We 
began the walk back west until we came to a point where the ridge simply 
stopped. Seeing as Banks Ridge was not supposed to do that, and we could not see 
anything because visability was down to about 10m because of the rain, and it 
was 
about 6PM and we were soaked, we decided to find an overhang and spend the 
night. We got a fire going and had a reasonable although fairly uncomfortable 
night. Sitting at the fire we decided that what we had probably done was hit the 
wrong catchment from the very beginning and what we thought was King Georges was 
actually a tributary of Explorers Brook which runs parallel to King Georges 
about 500m to a km to the south and that we were camped on Mt Caley.

The next morning the rain cleared for just long enough for us to get our 
bearings and decide that we were definitely on Mt Caley. What we thought would 
be a fairly straight forward walk to a fire road ended up being a bit more of a 
scrub bash due to some dodgy navigation on my behalf. Anyway we made it back to 
the fire road and had a 10km walk back to the car. The last 5km of this I ran so 
as to call off the cavalry asap, but it was to late as i met them about a km 
from the car park. 

In my opinion I think it was an interesting canyon/scrub bash/exploratory trip 
although I don't think Amy would agree. 

Alex


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