Pretty in pink - a nice epidemic!

 

The pink flannel flower (Actinotus forsythii) is considered to be a very rare and special thing. It's only found in a handful of places in south-east Australia, and it's only found about a year after a bushfire. Its growth is thought to be dependent on the presence of a particular chemical in the bushfire smoke.

When a group of us came across a tiny handful of the flowers a couple of years ago in a remote bushwalking spot (see here: Sept 2019 post ), we were told we were unlikely to ever see one again. They were a bit like Halleys Comet, or a total eclipse of the sun. Once in a lifetime.

 

 

 

Well, they're back with a vengeance, and they're in all kinds of easy-to-access places this time. Like right alongside the Narrowneck Road near Katoomba. Every man and his botanist friend is out there admiring them. It's all to do with the massive bushfires of 12 months or so ago.

More Blue Mountains: Furbers steps waterfalls

On my post-fire Blue Mountains exploration the other day, I headed down Furbers Steps for a bit, to see how it was looking down there.







It was looking quite good. There had been a fair bit of rain, and here was Witches Leap, the first waterfall you come to, doing its thing.

And here was Katoomba Falls.










The mist made for some very atmospheric views through the rainforest on the way down.

Real sisters visible again

On a recent trip to the Blue Mountains, I'd gone to Echo Point in Katoomba hoping to see what the 'Ruined Castle' fire was up to, only to find that all I could see was smoke. (Here: I see no fires )

The fires have been out for a while now, and there I was again the other day, showing off the Three Sisters to a couple of tourists.

Except that for a while at least, all we could see this time was clouds and rain. I had to pose them in front of the billboard.

Eventually it did clear though, and the view was indeed excellent.

A Ruined Castle ramble

It's one of those classic Blue Mountains walks. I first did it during a visit to Sydney about 30 years ago. I remember looking across the Jamison Valley from Katoomba's Echo Point lookout, and thinking that yes, that collection of big rocks out there on the way to Mount Solitary really does look just a little bit like a ruined castle! I remember that it wasn't particularly busy out there, and I remember the hungry looking currawongs eyeing off my lunch.

The other day I joined the bushwalkers for a routine return visit. We started at the park at the top of Furbers Steps, checked out the Three Sisters from the lookouts on the way down, and hurried through the heavily touristed area at the bottom of the scenic railway. Then it was out over the landslide, and along the long level track below Narrowneck.

The Ruined Castle is as scenic a place as ever to have your lunch. It's a lot busier than before. Social media is responsible for that. A handful of bushwalking destinations seem to have got the five stars on Tripadvisor, and that's where they all go. One group even brought a drone with them, and were (illegally) flying it annoyingly above our heads for a while.








No currawongs any more. Wonder what happened to them. There was a very big fat skink eyeing off one person's lunch though.

Megalong Ledges

I'm often amazed at how many excellent classic walks there are in the Blue Mountains which were completely unknown to me beforehand, and not in the usual repertoire of my bushwalking club.  My more adventurous Thursday group have knowledge of many more places, and yesterday some of us checked out another one of these.

It's known as the 'Megalong Ledges', and you go from Medlow Bath to Katoomba along a series of ledges half way down the cliffs above the Megalong Valley. The ledges are mostly quite wide and safe, and there are usually trees around you, so it's not so scary.

Near the start is a fine little rock formation, called the 'Three Brothers', because of their uncanny resemblance to the larger Three Sisters at Katoomba. Here's 'Brother Harold', making it four.




A bit to the north and at the top, the historic Hydro Majestic Hotel.









The ledges proper now. Always scenic, often very colourful, and usually with excellent views of the valley below.

Needless to say, it's a rock-climbers' paradise around here. There are climbing bolts everywhere. Maybe in the next life I'll be able to get interested in that pursuit. Not now though. It's fun enough anyway around here even with your feet on (fairly) solid ground.

Brother Paul here isn't a rock climber either, but he's climbed more mountains than almost anyone else in the world. See his extremely informative blog here: http://mntviews.blogspot.com.au/

A walk called Bruce

I'd been hearing about this lost-and-found-again bushwalk for a while,and jumped at the chance to find it for myself the other day, with my Friday bushwalking group.




Bruce was the surname of the Railways Dept surveyor who originally planned the track in 1931, as a maintenance track for a new power line that the Railways had got the job of putting in. It went from Blackheath to Bullaburra in the Blue Mountains, and it was promoted as a bushwalking track until World War 2, when it somehow got forgotten. It became overgrown and lost, and parts of it stolen for other purposes. Then in more recent times it got rediscovered and renovated by various legendary bushwalkers. Its continued existence does not seem to be celebrated by the National Parks people, the Blue Mountains City Council people, or the maps people, all of whom probably just see it as an extra expense if they were expected to maintain it or map it. Today it can be negotiated from Medlow Bath (starting from the Katoomba airstrip) to Wentworth Falls, and then from the other side of Wentworth Falls to Bullaburra.

We like it though. It's big enough to feel you've done a bit, and you get to see hanging swamps, cliffs and canyons, thicker forest, and do at least five significant downs and ups of 100-200m or more, to cross the various creeks flowing north towards the Grose River. Some of it's along fire trails under the power line, but a lot of it is on perfectly pleasant walking track away from the power line a bit.

There were new and old relics to see along the way - mostly new fire service signs or bits of old power poles. This kept our accompanying historian Keith happy. We saw no snakes unfortunately (I love snakes), but mountain dragons and other little lizards were in attendance. There were waratahs in flower, plus Keith identified two rare and special flowers found only in the Upper Blue Mountains.




Although most of the track is easy to follow, sometimes with track markers every few metres, some of it isn't quite like that. We lost it at one stage for half an hour or so, while we thrashed about in the bush until we suddenly got lucky and hit on it again.

As usual, a good day out in the bush. I plan to put it on the regular programme of my bushwalking club at some stage soon, now that it's well and truly found again.

Read more on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bruce's_Walk

Rennies Tunnel - 'inadvisable to enter'

My Thursday bushwalking group had another great little adventure the other day. We used to call

ourselves the 'Famous Five', but then became the 'Thursday surveyors'. Actually there were only three of us on this trip, and it was a Friday rather than a Thursday, but that just shows how flexible we can be.

We did the traverse of Rennies Tunnel - a relatively little known 400m long shortcut right through Katoomba's Narrowneck Peninsula. It used to be part of the route for shale oil rock being hauled out to Katoomba from the mines on the Megalong Valley side. The entrances were blocked off when the mines closed, but seem to have become (just) negotiable again, to slimmer bushwalkers at least.

And it's horrible. It's wet, muddy, and claustrophobic, the ceiling is very low in places, making it necessary to be physically very flexible, or to crawl through the slime and effectively bring to an end the useful life of the clothes you're wearing at the time. There have been partial collapses of the ceiling, and there's a bat colony (which we somehow missed). There's a half-hearted but somewhat sad official looking barrier at the start, and there have been pronouncements from sensible authorities that it is 'inadvisable to enter'.

We don't always take sensible advice. In fact, I have to admit that I'm a bit of a repeat offender, in that I did the thing once before, about 17 years ago in fact, and swore I'd never do it again, so uncomfortable was the experience.



Here we are, manoeuvring our way through the very restricted section just before the exit hole.




After emerging into the light, we spent some time enjoying the blissful relief, and adjusting our attire. The plastic shoes and plastic bags had done their job, sort of. Then it was off again, through the bush, around in circles for a while as we surveyed various alternative routes (for next time?!) to the Water Board ladders.

We knew well that the Water Board ladders were no longer the preferred option for ascending the cliffs and returning to where we started at the top. They had  been removed, all the signs said. In fact only the top and bottom bits had been removed, and I got the feeling that some of the rock-climbing adventurers who come here were still finding ways to use them. Not for us though - we'd had quite enough adventure for one day, and went up via the more conventional Devils Hole route.

So an excellent day out. Rennies Tunnel (or the Mt Rennie Tunnel, as it's also known) cuts straight through the peninsula below, at roughly its narrowest point. The big question now is will I be back in 17 years time to do it once more?


(Some pictures courtesy Paul)

Bleichert's ropey old ropeway

It operated for a mere nine months or so, before breaking up and falling in a heap on the valley floor. Its sad and rusty relics are still there after 125 years, largely out of sight and overgrown in the Blue Mountains bush.

Bleichert's Aerial Ropeway was erected in 1889 to carry kerosine shale rock from mines in the Ruined Castle area out to what's now the Scenic Railway area near Katoomba. It was state-of-the-art equipment built in Germany by Adolf Bleichert & Co. The Katoomba Coal & Shale Co. was no doubt very proud of its mighty machine, with its dozens of big buckets, innovative systems of cables, cogs, tensioning and braking mechanisms, and more.



 (Our GPS trace map courtesy of Paul Ma)




See the survey report of the Blue Mountains Heritage Institute for more on it, and on the cataloguing of its bits:
 http://www.bmwhi.org.au/wp/wp-content/uploads/2015/04/Final-Report-Bleichert-Ropeway-Survey-2015-.compressed.pdf   You may also be able to work out exactly how it all fitted together too. We couldn't, having seen up close all kinds of strange arrangements, with cables in rock grooves, for instance.




My Thursday Survey bushwalking group decided it was time to explore all this the other day. We expected a very arduous bush bash, with cliffs and chasms, impenetrable vegetation, and severe navigational challenges. But it wasn't actually that hard. There are often orange marker ribbons, and for much of the 3km route you're actually in sight of bits of cable, or buckets or other junk. It's a dead straight line of course, though that doesn't always help as much as you think it should, when you're in dense bush and there are varying slopes and ascents and descents of hundreds of metres.

Having made it through to the Ruined Castle track, we followed this back around to Scenic World, and some of our members took the easy way up. (Some of us didn't  and nearly beat them back anyway!)

A thoroughly satisfying and interesting little outing.





I hope the engineer who did the original loading calculations never got to work on anything important again!