Pulpit Rock the long way

The legendary Thursday Survey bushwalkers were out in force again recently. We were surveying a new (for most of us) route in the Mount Victoria area of the Blue Mountains.

We started along the historic Berghofers Pass track on the Mount York Road, and spent the next seven hours traversing various terrains to work our way round and back to Mount Vic, with Pulpit Rock as the official destination.

At the appropriate point we crossed the highway and headed up the safety ramp and on to Mount Victoria proper (the mountain, that is).

Looking back down on the highway we just crossed.

Terrific views and easy off-track walking, heading generally southward along the ridges. 

One of which was a fairly narrow (almost but not quite 'knife edge') ridge.

Eventually it's down onto the scenic hobby farm area around Blackheath Creek. Then along the road for a while, and into the bush and up the Little Zig Zag Track, heading north again.













And on to pulpit rock. A great day out!

Image credit: Freda Moxom

My first snake of the season: an endangered Broad-headed one!

I really like snakes. Don't see nearly enough of them, despite being out in the bush so often. So far this snake season (the warmer half of the year) they've just about eluded me.

But last week, on a rocky outcrop above Victoria Brook just outside Mount Victoria in the Blue Mountains, there it was: the first of the season. And it wasn't a common old brown snake, a red-bellied blacksnake, or a diamond python. It was the rare and endangered broad-headed snake (Hoplocephalus bungaroides). My second ever such sighting, and both out in the western Blue Mountains area.

They used to be common throughout the Sydney Basin, though they were always endemic to the region. Now they are only found in some of these remoter areas. Click here for: Wikipedia article

It seemed oblivious to us for a while, but eventually it woke up when we started pointing our cameras at it. It reared up, looked threatening for a moment, and then slithered into a hole under a rock.

It is indeed rather venomous, I gather. I always forget to be frightened though.


(Photo credit below: Angela McArthur)

Another Famous Five big adventure (while the mountains burn above them)

This week my 'Famous Five'  Thursday adventure bushwalking group took it on itself to explore some of the historic relics near Mt Victoria in the Blue Mountains. In particular, the 'Chert Incline', which had a short and inglorious career in the 1920s, bringing up chert from deep down below the cliffs, near the Fairy Bower Creek.

What's chert? Macquarie's says: A compact rock consisting essentially of cryptocrystalline quartz. Flintstone, incidentally, is a particular form of chert. The Mt Victoria chert was used as road metal. The company went bankrupt very quickly, maybe because it was such a big and ambitious engineering venture, as we were able to ascertain as we retraced the route of the cable railway.

Several local historians and other bushwalkers have taken an interest in rediscovering these relics recently, opening up ancient tracks through the steep, scrubby bushland, and identifying and marking bits and pieces of old iron, railway sleepers, steam engines and winding gear. We were doing our bit to further explore it all. And gee, it's a fabulous way to spend a day!

We continued on down into the Kanimbla Valley, and with a fair bit of our trademark trial and error, bushbashing and bravado, we put together a round-trip walk, that took us back up along the Reinits Pass track and up onto Pulpit Rock. Then a short walk through the streets to Mount Victoria.

It had been a hot and windy day. Fire danger had been high, and a fire had been burning for days near Lithgow. But that was a fair distance away. We'd kept an eye out for smoke, and had had our plan for dealing with any bushfire we encountered. (Our plan was to "Get down low and go, go, go"!) But we really weren't expecting anything along those lines to happen.

As we approached Mount Victoria station, however, where my car was parked, what did we see but big clouds of black smoke, and an advancing fire, only a few hundred metres away! We'd been blissfully unaware that since lunchtime the Blue Mountains fires had been raging away, dominating  the national news, causing massive destruction and traffic chaos, and blackening skies all over the Sydney basin.. The Mount Victoria fire was one of the bad ones.

I literally ran to retrieve my car, and we got out of there quickly. Passing through Springwood we had a chance to see the plumes of smoke from what used to be Winmalee and Yellow Rock. Over 100 homes have been destroyed in this fire alone so far. And tomorrow the weather turns hot again. 

Anything could happen in the next few days, both here and in the rest of New South Wales. The Lithgow fire (thought by some to have been started by an army live bombing practice exercise) has spread over a huge area, and may well destroy many of the Famous Five's very favourite bushwalking adventure grounds.





Sydney Morning Herald piece on the fires: http://www.smh.com.au/environment/weather/more-than-100-homes-destroyed-conditions-set-to-worsen-20131018-2vshk.html

Dunns Leap (of faith?)

More a leap of youthful carelessness perhaps. Dunn was 14-year-old Charles Dunn, who in 1908 managed to fall over a 50 metre cliff, yet survived to tell the tale. He was running around in the cave far above when he slipped over the edge.

It seems he landed on ferns and soft mud, broke not a single bone in his body, and walked home while his friends were coming down to look for his dead body. Today there's a wire strung along his trajectory down the cliff face, though you can't quite see it in my picture. You do get an idea of just how lucky he was though!

Most of the geographical 'Leap' names you see are in fact waterfalls, (like Govetts Leap), that being an old name for waterfall. This one however celebrates a real leap!

Dunns Leap is one of the many attractions, along with caves, a Fairy Bower, and scenic rock platforms with views over the Kanimbla Valley, that you can walk to in the Mt Piddington area, right near the settlement of Mt Victoria. The highest point in the area, One Tree Hill, at 1111m, is in fact the highest point in the Blue Mountains, though you'd never pick it. Mt Banks and Mt Hay, the usual suspect bumps on the horizon from Sydney, look a lot higher.

A group of us explored the area yesterday, and revelled in the fine weather and interesting terrain. Some of the walking tracks are in excellent condition, though as we progressed a bit further it all became a bit more adventurous, slippery, and obstructed by fallen trees etc. We were particularly taken by the sheer cliffs under Mt Hourn (or Mt Horne as some of the signs spelt it), with markings and pegs for the brave rock climbers who frequent the place. There were also two mysterious large square pits, now full of water, hidden away in the bush.