Canyoning Macquarie Pass with Wulf and his friends.

Had a full day of canyoning last Sunday with Wulf and his friends. Met Wulf from Water Polo and also at Hangdog, so thats how I know he’s into rock climbing and canyoning.

Woke up at 5:45am in the morning and left the house at 6:45am as we were meeting at the car park at the bottom of Macquarie Pass at 7:30am. I’ve done Macquarie Pass twice before but this time we’re dong it from the top, the very start of the canyon. There were 5 people in our group. There was Wulf, Richard, Wulf’s sister Anna, Anna’s boyfriend Andrew and myself. It was Anna and Andrew’s first time canyoning. We parked the vehicle at the top and walked downhill a bit before heading toward the river. It took a while before we got into the river as we got a little lost and had to bash through some really thick plants. Had scratches on my forearms, hands and neck as a result of that. Also there were lots of leeches!!! We kept walking instead of trying to pull the leeches off as there were too many of them and they were jumping on to us faster than we could pull them off.

Once we got into the river, we followed it down stream for a while before hitting the first abseil. There were 3 abseils and a mini jump before getting to the abseil where we would normally get to if we started on Clover Hill Road. The second of the 3 abseils was 35m long!!!! Good thing Wulf and his mate Richard had a 70m and a 100m rope between the two of them! The views of the waterfall were amazing!

We started at around 8:30am and it was around 12:30pm when we got to the start of the first abseil if we had parked at Clover Hill Road.

The rest of the canyon from there was familiar. There were three areas where the slings were removed!?#! Luckily Wulf brought extra slings so we were able to attach new slings. Got to the final slide at around 4:30pm and was back at the car park at 5pm.

There was an accident along the main road we took to get to the parking lot and we could hear Ambulance and a helicopter when we were walking out of the canyon (towards the car park). As a result of the accident, we couldn’t drive back to Albion Park on that road and had to drive up the pass and do a big loop to Jamberoo and around to Albion Park. That took more time and by the time I got home, it was 6:30pm. It also started raining when I was driving so we were very lucky with the weather. 🙂

Great canyoning day!