Hat Hill & beyond

 

Yet again I found myself exploring a terrific Blue Mountains bushwalking wonderland that's been well explored by almost everyone but me!

I'd taken the Hat Hill Rd north-east from Blackheath many times before, en route to Perrys Lookdown, though the road to there seems to be closed at the moment. I'd never quite checked out little Hat Hill itself, Bald Head to its north (except for the view of it from the other side of the Grose Valley), or even the touristy Anvil Rock lookout.

 

 

Here we are the other day, heading north from Hat Hill.

The view down the Grose Valley

And up it

A short burst of scary-looking bad weather swept through, to remind us of the week of extreme wetness we'd just been through. It was soon gone again though.

 

 

A native cockroach - clean and wholesome,and rather beautiful, I thought

 

 

Anvil Rock Lookout. It's so named of course because it's shaped like an anvil. But it also has a 305kg actual steel anvil bolted to it, just to be sure.

 

 

From several points along the way, we got good views of Sydney's distant urban centres. In addition, we could see some large areas of water, being the now-flooded flood plain of the Hawkesbury-Nepean river.

Here comes the sun!

 
This evening there was a bright light in the sky! And bits of blue too!

After a long and miserable wet week, the sun came out again.

Here in my northern Sydney suburb, we had about 350mm of rain. That's a record for my rain gauge, though some parts of the state, further north, got around 1000mm.

Surf's up in Coogee

There's been one of those wild winter weather events this week along Sydney's coastal strip. It's involved 10m waves and closed beaches of course.

But surfers don't do closed beaches, at least not the intrepid ones. They were there again at Coogee.

On Wednesday there was one fewer than on Tuesday. One had gone out and gone missing. Even the Virgin Mary couldn't help. (She was famously seen here about 20 years ago.)

Above: there's nobody in the normally placid rock pool!

Stormy weather swallows ocean pool

The drought, the heatwave, the fires, and the big winds have been and gone. It was rather a nice day today. Perfect temperature, blue sky, ideal for that trip to North Narrabeen and a dip in Sydney's best ocean pool.

But it's not to be. Recent stormy weather is still showing wreaking havoc along the east coast. So no swimming in the ocean pool today.




I wasn't the only photographer who was enjoying the dramatic views This chap had to keep running for cover as enormous waves broke around him.

Droughts and flooding rains

It was almost inevitable that our worst ever drought, hottest ever heatwave, and worst ever bushfires, would be followed by one of the wettest ever downpour events. That's what happened last weekend. My rain gauge recorded 250mm, the highest for any three or four day period in its lifetime, and some areas in the Blue Mountains recorded over 500mm.





Remembering the minor flood we experienced a few years ago during a lesser rain event, I did a bit of quick civil engineering outside, and hastily constructed a drainage channel to steer the water safely down the side of the house and out towards the street.




Dorothea Mackeller famously wrote about her love of her sunburnt country, a land of droughts and flooding rains. Several of our shockingly ignorant, coal-loving politicians having been quoting Dorothea Mackeller a lot lately, implying that climate change has nothing to do with our current climatic extremes. They're no longer managing to convince many though.

Hotter

I said that today could be even worse. Well, it was!

Hot

It just kept getting hotter yesterday afternoon. It was the day we'd been warned about. South East Australia has been literally on fire for months, and it's only getting worse. Here in Sydney's northern suburbs it was hot, hot, hot.

Today was much cooler, but there's  little prospect of rain any time soon, and this Saturday could be even worse fire weather than yesterday was.

It's raining and the angophora's shining!

We've finally had a good dose of rain after a lot of very dry months in Sydney. We'll need a few more such events over the spring and summer, if we're to avoid a dreadful bushfire season, but it's a nice start.

The angophora tree out the front looks like it's loving it!

Angophora costata

Angophora costata is a common woodland and forest tree of Eastern Australia, and is known by a variety of names including smooth-barked apple, rose gum, rose apple and Sydney red gum. It grows primarily on sandstone soils, usually on headlands, plateaus or other elevated areas. More at Wikipedia

Sydney sizzles - this time the clock melted!

Summer's hardly started, but we've had several spells of hot, hot, hot already. In the lead up to Christmas, we're having a blessed patch of cool and rainy, but here's a picture from our lounge room in November.