Upper Lane Cove National Park - all burned out!

 

There were a lot of hazard-reduction burns around Sydney over the last couple of weeks. A lot of smoke too. One of them was in the upper Lane Cove National Park, rather closer to home than I'd realised. Here are some pictures from my stroll through the area this morning. 

A rare pink beauty!

You'll probably never see these again, we were told by leader Harold, on our bushwalk the other day. We were on a mountain near Newnes, and we were in a patch of burned-out vegetation. We'd come across a collection of pink flannel flowers (Actinotus forsythii). They're only found in a relatively few places in SE Australia, and only during the summer immediately following a bushfire.

Gooches Crater

Gooches Crater is a classic old favourite Blue Mountains bushwalk. It's a pleasant two or three hours in along the ridge tops north of Bell.

You start at the spot on Sandham Road just beyond the now unwelcoming private property that we used to be able to walk across. You sidle across to the east a few hundred metres, then join the good old main ridge track northwards.

After crossing the Wollangambe River (probably on a big fallen tree trunk), you clamber up again, and do a couple more kilometres northwards along another ridge. The tracks have become much harder to find, in the aftermath of the massive bushfire here three years ago (described here: 2013 adventure ) and under my expedition leadership, we wandered around a bit more than I'd hoped, before eventually finding our way into the Crater through the maze of hills and pagodas and ridges. It's not really a crater. It just looks like one.






















After lunch among the flannel flowers, we explored some nearby rock features, and then pioneered another route back, via Friday Canyon (as named by us on a previous expedition, pictured here), and Dargan Arch.











Another nice day out for the Thursday Surveyors!

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

Black skies over Blacktown

I went out today on a mission to explore the suburb of Blacktown. I'm sure there was lots there to report on - a very large shopping centre and a very colourful melting pot population spring to mind initially - but my attention was hijacked by the dramatic sky and the bushfires raging to the west.

We're only a few days out of winter, but already the temperatures are in the 30s, there's been no real rain for two months, and a hot wind from the north west has resulted in several nasty bushfires on Sydney's western edges. Homes have been destroyed, firefighters injured, schools evacuated, all the usual.

Three days ago my fellow Australians voted in a new Government, led by Tony "Climate Change is Crap" Abbott. He's going to scrap the price on carbon pollution, and concentrate on the important things like chopping down and digging up, boosting the coal industry, and generally doing business as normal but more so.

So we ain't seen nothing yet.