On Saturday 5th May several members of the UTS Outdoor Adventure Club went on a day trip to the River Caves Canyon in Wollemi National Park, the largest wilderness area in NSW and part of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area – a maze of canyons, cliffs and undisturbed forest.
I arrived at Strathfield station (the meeting point) at 0730, and was joined soon after by Roland and Shawn. Just after 0800 David and Chuin Nee (the two car drivers) arrived and we started the drive to the Blue Mountains.
On the way we picked up Kent at North Richmond and stopped a while afterwards for morning tea.
We took longer than I expected to do the actual walk to River Caves Canyon and back to the car (1100 to 1600) because as soon as we got close to the canyon everyone whipped out a plethora of camera equipment, lenses, tripods etc. I reckon all up the groups camera equipment would have cost $8,000 – $10,000+ so its lucky that no one slipped and damaged anything!
The canyon itself isn’t particular difficult to walk through because there’s no abseiling required, though you do have to walk through the creek several times mostly ankle/shin deep and once upto knee deep.
If you want to take photographs in the canyon don’t bother trying unless you bring a tripod and a proper SLR/ultrazoom camera because it’s quite dark and most sections require quite long exposures and a camera with good noise reduction. If you take a standard point and click camera that fits in your pocket I doubt you’d get be able to take any good shots at all.
Another must have is proper footwear because throughout the walk you’ll have to scramble up, over and around a lot of rocks and really thick scrub and in the canyon you’ll need plenty of grip in the wet sections walking through the creek. As with most canyoning/climbing/bushwalking trips, Dunlop Volleys were the shoe of choice amongst our group.
For further information and photos read Tom Brennan’s review of a walking trip to River Caves Canyon and see some photos of River Caves Canyon taken by the webmaster of Emerald Images
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