What does it involve? We drive from Sydney to the mountains (not a short drive), park our car at the top of a giant hill and walk down to a freezing cold river with cliffs on either side. We then swim down the river until there is a point that you can climb back out and up the gigantic hill. Exhausted, cold and hungry we drive back home and plan our next trip.
Sometimes I think it is a little crazy, similar to skiing. In skiing you sit on a chair and are battered with freezing winds. Once at the top of the mountain you ski down which is to the internal dialogue of "shit shit shit shit." You then get to the bottom of the slope, pay exuberant money for food or drink and then repeat. Somehow I still see skiing as one of the greatest holidays.
So my two older brothers and my professional girlfriend were going canyoning at Mt Hay. We did the drive and started our walk where we quickly were met with knee deep mud and leaches. The mud is not so bad really; I just hate the thought that a leach might be sucking my blood. It wasn't helped by Elle asking "what happens if they get in my ear?"
We continued on and the mud slowly became a creek and then the creek dropped down into a valley which was surrounded by cliffs and waterfalls, we were now canyoning. Our first abseil was down a lovely waterfall, which had a slippery overhang on it. The picture below actually has my brother under the waterfall if you look closely. Maybe it is hard to see. He is the thing attached to the rope that is making the water change direction mid fall.
We were surrounded now by great cliffs on either side and with an abseil down we had reached the point of no return. haha.
My worry at this point is that we will get to the next abseil and the anchor (the tree or rock that we tie the rope around) will have been washed away in a flood. I often wonder what I would do. There is normally no phone reception and parents know where we are but don't expect a phone call for hours. In most places I would expect the situation to be a bit of a tea party where we find the one patch of sunlight and talk and play games until someone comes to save us.
We next came to a jump in. It was about a 4 m drop into black water. Technically it is possible to set up a abseil here, but it takes time and in a recent track report people said that the water underneath was clear. My brother led the way without hesitation and then scouted the depth of water after already taking the leap of faith into the water
I'm the one still up the top of the jump and I believe that is Elle shooting through the air. I had to go next, I hate the moment where you start counting down for yourself. You throw yourself forward which just feels wrong, but as soon as you are in the air you get the rush, quickly replaced by freezing cold water.
The walls of the canyon closed in, now they were just meters apart and maybe 20m high. We had come to the double abseil. From reports we knew that you abseiled down to a rock suspended by the walls of the canyon. At this point you set up another abseil and go on down again. This is all we could see from above.
Below us was a waterfall hidden by the rocks which generated a roar. From where we stood we couldn’t see the rock that was our destination. Once again my brother led first, and disappeared behind the canyon wall. The rope went limp and we heard distant yelling so we followed.
The next bit we don’t have photo's from. So I drew a picture.
All four of us were on the rock, stuck between the walls of the canyon. It was pretty cramped, we had one rope connecting us all together ancored to the rock. We were setting up for the next abseil. There was the roar of the waterfall and a constant spray of water on us as it bounced off the walls. The abseil below us was around 20m but we couldn't see the bottom of it. As we pulled the rope down, there was a fair bit of friction, then it stopped coming all together. We all pulled the rope as hard as we could but it wouldn’t budge. Our rope was stuck!
I had the horrible thought of being stuck on this tiny rock for hours. It was dark, cold and we were wet. My tea party couldn't happen here, there was no patch of sun, no way we could talk over the roar of the water and no way to stay warm.
We gathered what rope we had pulled down, and measured it, a rough guess would be 42m by our arms lengths. (the way we do canyoning abseils is we double it up so that you can pull it down at the end, we believed we needed 40m of rope to do the next abseil and we had to double it up because there were abseils after this one), and so taking charge my brother cut the rope that we could from the cliff above.
We then set up the abseil, we couldn't see the bottom, we didn't know if the rope made it all the way but we had no choice so my brother went down. He turned a corner in the canyon and we lost sight of him, there was no way to tell if the rope was long enough, no way to hear him but the rope went limp. We felt for tugs of the rope or any signal that it made it to the bottom as opposed to a 10m drop from inaccurate track notes. Elle went next.
I followed Elle, and turned the corner of the canyon to find my brother standing in the water belaying and Elle on a bank. I took over so my brother could get out of the waterfall and my other brother followed down the abseil. This is a picture of me down the bottom and my brother going down the waterfall. You can see the corner off to the left which is as far as we could see from the rock above.
Once down the bottom it was pretty amazing. We had overcome something that if we were unlucky could have been disastrous. There was a patch of sun and we shivered knowing that we had made it out of the worst of it. We still had a number of abseils and a rock climb to get out, but I think that is another story.
The other story can be found as written by my professional girlfriend Eleanor .
We drove home, we were tired and we slept. Somehow it was still a great day; I can't wait to do it again.
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