SUREFIRE CANYON – DECEMBER 2013
My first mistake was agreeing to do a one day canyon on the Newnes Plateau, and not driving up the night before, and driving home the day after. What is it with Lindsay and these “day” canyon trips, it was a round trip of 6.5 hours before we even did the canyon (which turned into an epic). Yes, I’d never done Surefire and I really wanted to do it, but sometimes you have to stop yourself!
Lindsay, Klaus, Verena, Cat and I did the trip. The track notes published give a detailed description of the trip, so no need to go into details here.
Having said that, it’s a long, long walk in and then there’s quite a bit of scouting around for the track. We didn’t find one into the creek system, we navigated there. In The Old Days, when you could drive a lot of the way in, there would have been a decent track established, but not that it’s such a long walk, it’s not a canyon that is done again and again, most people would do it once and say, that’s enough. We figured the round trip, car to car was 20k and it took us 11 (although my notes say it might have been more like 14) hours, mind you, we weren’t fast, we took our time in the canyon to enjoy it, and then we slowed down considerably at the end because getting out was just endless.
I think we did an additional abseil just getting down into the creek, we were over route finding by then and it was very, very hot. We just got down into the creek, put our wetsuits on and sat in one of the pools of water. The abseils are a bit tricky but really good. I took a fall on the last one (I think it’s the last one), and now feel compelled to go back and do it the right way, I sent everyone else down a really safe way but then re-rigged the rope so it wouldn’t get caught on sticks and what do you know, managed to bang myself up really badly.
The exit is “interesting”, luckily we had Klaus and Verena with us and they’re very good on climbs, setting up ropes for me to haul myself up. Cat of course could scramble up anything.
So, we were up in the creek used for exiting and it went on, and on, and on. Never ending, then we got up onto a spur/ridge where we thought the going might be easier. We were fortunate that we eventually found the old f
ire trail at 9pm and were at least on a track. We all had head torches (Klaus may not have had one so went ahead), and we soldiered on. We got back to the car at 11pm AND we then had to drive home to the Central Coast.
Lessons learned … camp up there the night before, and the night of the canyon. Take someone who can do the tricky climbs.
We did have a brilliant day, and this is definitely a trip post-worthy, mainly because we took so long. So, I not only feel compelled to go back and do it in less than 14 hours, but also to re-do that abseil that I took a fall on.