[Canyoning] Winter Canyoning – ‘Better Offer’/’Wounded Knee’ 5/6th August

Looking to get out of Sydney for the day I made some somewhat spontaneous plans with James, Dave and Nicole to have a go at ‘Better Offer’ canyon in the Blue Mountains. The canyon itself is about a 45 minute walk south of the Bells Line of Road near the Mt Wilson turnoff. It a cool but pleasant day as we headed off down the vaguely marked track. According to the guidebook the canyon itself consists of four abseils and two waist deep wades, however one of these turned out to be more like chest deep. The canyon exit involves scrambling around under some cliffs with views off to the south of the Grose Valley, then into the bottom of Birraband canyon. From here a track can be found back up onto a ridge and back to the road. All in all not a particularly demanding canyon, easily done in half a day. Nicole, despite being well into the second half of her pregnancy, didnt seem to have any issues with any of the abseils or scrambles. 

Having Monday off I managed to rope Dave into doing another canyon ‘Wounded Knee’ for which we were joined by Tom Murtagh. I’d had my eye on this particular canyon for some time due to the fact that it is a mostly dry canyon and, well, I hadnt done it before. Leaving Sydney early we drove out towards Windsor and on up the Putty road to the Caloul Ridge fire trail. The sign at the trailhead suggests four wheel drive only. They arent kidding. Although the first 15km is mostly fine, we ran into some extremely muddy and slippery ruts towards the final few kilometers of the firetrail. After some hairy slides and nearly getting seriously bogged we carefully retreated and instead walked the final few kilometers to the locked gate at the Hollow rock carpark. From here it is a matter of finding your way along a ridge to the west and down a gully into the start of the canyon. Although not classically canyonlike in appearance, there are a number of finteresting features and 8 abseils in all: 15m, 25m, 28m,  20m, 28m, 4m, 28m and the final spectacular 80m drop into the Colo River. Crossing the river proved to be somewhat more treachearous than it first seemed after sevaral times falling unexpectedly into spanner depth patches of quicksand. After managing to retreive the ropes from the final abseil we pushed on upstream towards the Wollemi Ck junction then upstream and onto the ridge to the east, up to Crawfords lookout. When we finally arrived back at the car it was 5 minutes to 5 o clock, almost 7 hours since setting out. Having built up a respectable appetite we stopped off at Windsor and were pleasantly suprised by the $10 steaks offered at the Macquarie Arms Hotel  (washed down with a schooner of beer of course). 

Photos below: