I really do have to lift my game

BOOLIJAH CREEK, ETTREMA WILDERNESS – 28 August 2020
One could be forgiven for thinking I was just starting out in the business of leading trips – you know pouring over maps and plotting routes – I well and truly stuffed up this time.  Should have looked at the track log from back in 2017!

So, why was I even thinking of returning to Boolijah Creek – after all it was a hakea nightmare back in 2017.  We had visited Boolijah Creek for two days and were really impressed by it, beautiful rainforest and lovely creek (apart from the hakea of course).

From 2017, at the end of the two days, we walked upstream until we came to this lovely deep pool and as it was autumn, it was too cold to swim across and check out the top.

Before the waterfall there was this stunning rock shelf back (photo from 2017).

I was so impressed by the downstream part of the creek and this rock shelf, I was certain that there were more lovely rock shelf parts of the creek further upstream, so I determined to return, particularly now that the scrub had been burned and the hakea would be as vicious.

Steve and I were driving down on the Friday to start a walk to Jones Creek on the Saturday morning, so I suggested that we go down early in the morning and spend a few hours in Boolijah Creek to see what was upstream of this waterfall.  We took our time driving down and arrived at the Yarramunmun Fire Trail around noon.

Starting the walk on Yarramunmun Fire Trail – brilliant weather.

Sadly the scrub wasn’t burned as much as it was over on the Ettrema Plateau, still scrubby, just no leaves!

It was hard not to get charcoal all over yourself.

We came to what looked like a relatively easy pass down into the creek.

Steve went first sussing out the route – not overly easy!

Almost at the bottom,

Looking up at the pass, would be easy to reverse it too.

In the creek, lots of bouldering not all that exciting and a little tedious.

The odd nice pool, but with the bush burned wasn’t the nice rainforest it would usually be.

We travelled a few hundred metres downstream and decided that we’d seen enough, big boulders and lots of dead fallen trees not very nice at all and it would be challenging getting around these two big boulders.

So we headed up to try to find a route out of this very unattractive country.

We got to the cliff-line and decided to take Steve’s “interesting” route.

And stumbled on a cool cave, was about 10m in but ended in nothing.

We headed around the cliff-line for a further 150m and then came to a creek, hoping there wouldn’t be a waterfall in it.

“Looks like it goes” says Steve.

So, headed up this really pleasant side creek.

And found the nice rocky slabs that I’d been looking for in the main creek!

These slabs went on for 100m and got us to within 200m of the fire trail, with burned scrub that wasn’t too bad.

Looking down our creek.

We were quickly back on the fire trail and arrived at the car at 3.30pm – not an entirely satisfactory walk but you get that.

So, I got home after the Jones Creek overnight walk and downloaded the track log for the Boolijah day … I don’t usually keep a track log in this instance it was fortunate that I did.

The blue track is what we did on Friday. The red track is part of what we did back in 2017.  Steve and I didn’t even go in at the right place and the part of the creek we were in was part of what we did in 2017.  In my defense though, it looked totally different.

Not only that, where we camped in 2017 (off a small side creek in a camp cave) was the same creek that Steve and I took to exit Boolijah Creek, mind you we didn’t see the camp cave, but we weren’t looking for one either.

If I’d been smart enough to look at the track log for 2017 BEFORE I went down there, could have avoided a wasted walk.  Mind you … my hard copy Sassafrass map had a different route drawn on it – I’m sure it did, but somewhere along the way on Friday I managed to lose my hard copy map, so can’t even look at that to see where I stuffed up.

So, more unfinished business, but do I really want to go back there … I’ll have to convince someone else to go with me, pretty sure it wont be Steve!  Thanks Steve for being so good about the dodgy walk.