That’s it for me and the bloody Bird Men!

YENGO NP – 5 May 2019
I’ve now been searching for the aboriginal rock engravings, “two Bird Men” or “two Emu Men” for at least four years.  Admittedly I’ve only gone to the area once or twice a year, but I hadn’t given up hope of finding these elusive rock engravings, and I’d dragged unsuspecting friends with me each time, to NO avail!  This weekend wasn’t any different, so I’ve washed my hands of this grid reference once and for all, and erased the GR from my map!

Thankfully, we had another site to look for so all wasn’t lost.  Heather (who’ll go anywhere with me) R, Brad M, and Greg G joined me for the day, it would also serve as a fitness walk for me so that I don’t lose the fitness that I think I’ve gained over the last three weeks.

I wasn’t quite on the ball with this trip, I’m blaming it on the fact that I’ve been away for 18 of the past 21 days!  Anyway, the fire trail that I wanted to use, wasn’t (to me) as obvious as I thought it should be, and we ended up using an overgrown trail, that ended on a knoll after 100m.  So, we figured we’d just bush bash down the knoll and eventually meet up with the trail, which ended up being about 30 minutes of bush bashing.

We were all happy to get out of the scrub (Brad – “don’t go this way”)!

What we’d been fighting our way through.

We walked for a short while then dropped packs looking for an art site I’d been told about, found it very quickly.  I decided later that it was a good thing we looked for this in the beginning of the day, at least everyone felt that they’d found something.

Plus another overhang with what I’d been told was a kangaroo, not all that convinced this is authentic though, and you can barely see it!

So, only an hour and a half into the walk and we’d found our first objective.  I had thought about crossing a creek and climbing a big hill, but for some reason decided that walking along the creek sounded better.  So, we wandered downstream.

We found this lounge rock, add a few cushions to it and some margaritas and  Heather and I could just chill out here.

The main creek is dry for quite a way until you reach the deep pools (about a k downstream), but we weren’t going that far today.  It’s been a long time since they’ve had rain though, no indication at all that there’s been any flow in recent times.

We then took a side creek (that I’d walked up a few times before), also very dry.  I’ve seen this flowing once many years ago (or at least it had water in it), but the last time I was here, there were just a few puddles in rock depressions.  This time no water at all and you could see that animals had been digging down trying to find water (shown here).

We came across a black snake (on my preferred campsite – wont be going back there), and continued upstream to the “lemon tree”, not very many lemons on it this time, brought home half a dozen.

This trip I decided that we’d walk upstream in a side creek, this was the only spot that I hadn’t explored looking for the bird men.  We walked upstream about 200m and could see that there weren’t any rock shelves beyond, and we were pretty close to the GR.  So, we climbed about 300m up the hill, looking for rock platforms (none), and then got on top of the cliff and hunted around in the vicinity of the GR, still no rock platforms, nothing even remotely looking like a spot that the Dharug people would have used as a rock grooving site.  I was out of puff by the time we got up the top of the hill and had lunch (maybe the lemons in my pack slowed me down).

By this time I’d had enough and was well and truly over looking for the bird men site, so decided that we’d drop down off the opposite side of the ridge and head back to the cars, ah well, it was 2pm anyway, we’d been at it for 5 hours.

Up to this point in time, the walk had been relatively easy, but dropping off the ridge was harder than expected, lots of zigging and zagging to avoid serious drops and at one point Greg muttered “this is more like the Marilyn walks that I remember!” (he’s been walking a lot with NPA and was looking to get a fix of off-track walking).

The angle of this photo is wrong, Heather and I both wore out our pants sliding down this rock ledge (covered in leaf litter).

Brad was out in front route finding with the instruction to find the “sweet spot” on the slope – the spot where the vegetation wasn’t too dense and there weren’t too many rocks/gullies.  He did a great job – once we got off that steep part anyway.

Brad’s interpretation of the Bird Men (or Emu Men), the only bird man we’d see all day.

Greg walking my sort of log (at ground level), he must be doing a lot of walking, looking very svelte.

We were back on the main fire trail by 3.30pm AND we’d found where the trail started that we should have been on in the morning – stood out like the proverbial dogs balls, not that I’ll be using that trail again in the future.

Despite not finding the Bird Men, was a nice walk, only two big “ups”, and lovely walking in the dry creek beds.  Thanks for joining me on this fitness walk Heather, Brad and Greg!

 

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4 Responses to That’s it for me and the bloody Bird Men!

  1. John says:

    i am reliably informed that Pina Coladas are presently the “in drink” in Havana, especially at noon i.e. between sunrise and sunset

  2. Heather Da Silva says:

    Well I was a happy bushbasher. Im happy to try again if the urge presents itself Marilyn 🙂

    • marilyn says:

      Once I got into it I was. Nah, am happy to try somewhere different next, although ask me in a couple of year’s time, there were some nice campsites we saw (other than the black-snake one).

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