Wounded Knee Canyon

Who: Matt, Dave, Jeremy

What: 2-day trip through Wounded Knee canyon

When: 3-4 July, 2010

After a seemingly endless semester of honours year engineering, another canyoning/camping trip was long overdue! The trip of choice was Wounded Knee canyon, one that I have been keen on doing for a long time.

We left home at around 9am and reached the Coloul Range locked gate at around 1pm after a fun four-wheel driving side trip. Impressed by the perfect winter weather (despite snow predicted that night for the mountains above 1000m), we ate some lunch and then headed off via Hollow Rock. It's interesting that this formation isn't shown on the New Series topo map (Six Brothers)but is on the old one.

Faced with the choice of 3 routes into the "canyon", we decided to follow the dry creek at GR 712234. I was anticipating the notorious lawyer vines described by a Tom Brennan trip report but fortunately we must have missed them all. Following the nice fern-filled gully we continued down the creek to the first short chute abseil. This was proceeded by a longer one - with tricky angles - into an interesting slot section. It was nice to see  the rocks mostly covered in moss and not worn yellow although there were recent volley footprints in the sand patches. Another small tricky drop, with the anchor very low and close to the edge was descended.

Given our late start, the sun had almost set. We donned our headlamps and continued on. After a bit of  down-climbing we reached the final abseil. By this stage, we could not see the bottom of the abseil, but could roughly make out the sand flat on the Colo River. My brother went down first. One of our ropes was just shy of 50m long and we were not entirely convinced it would make the bottom. At the second ledge David tied another 40m rope to the end and descended the overhang with a self belay, ready to pass the knot...which  was needed. While the ropes were being sorted out, Jerm and I climbed up on the left and enjoyed an  excellent, albeit night vision, view of the River and the night sky - including a couple of awesome shooting stars!

Finally, the "OFF ROPE" call was heard and Jeremy went down. This time, he stopped on the first ledge while David pulled the shorter rope through until both ropes reached the bottom. I did the same thing for my descent. The second ledge of this abseil had a deep pool that had to be either skirted or jumped
(while still on rope).

We crossed the Colo, which was only 10-15cm deep and surprisingly warm, and set up camp. We all enjoyed a hot dinner with fruit cake and custard for dessert!

The next day was equally excellent weather-wise. We woke up early, had breakky, pulled the ropes down and headed upstream to the Colo River - Wollemi Creek junction. Travel up Wollemi Creek involved a fair amount of slippery rock-hopping as we changed our minds as to which side of the creek was easier going. Just before the creek did a big bend we decided to climb up onto the spur and make our way out of the gorge.

Some parts of the climb involved some fun and quite exposed rock scrambling until we got to the foot track which traversed left across the steep ridge until a convenient pass took us up to Crawford's Lookout. Lunch was had while admiring the superb views and taking several panoramas and group shots. We then made our
way back towards the car and were there about 90 mins later.

All up, an excellent weekend was had in a pristine section of the Colo, with great company and perfect weather!