After the fires - Echo Point

The view over the Jamison Valley to Mount Solitary and the Ruined Castle. From here at least,  it's not looking too bad, in that in many areas the fire appears not to have destroyed the forest canopy.


I was here a few weeks ago, during the height of the 'Ruined Castle Fire'. Couldn't see much then because of the smoke. See my report: I see no fires

The Ruined Castle itself sits just behind the very brown area in the middle distance below.

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.

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!