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