WHEENY CREEK – May 4, 2025
Most people I bushwalk with these days use an app to get details of walks, sometimes downloading the actual track. One of the popular apps is AllTrails. AllTrails irritates the shit out of me, they post the tracks and next thing you know everyone, and their mother (or dog) is out there Instagramming. However, on this rare occasion I was happy to see a very well-defined track to our destination thanks I’m sure to All Trails.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s good that those that can’t navigate for themselves can safely go on walks. Having said that, there was a profusion of track markers … really? on such a well-defined track do you need to put a piece of toilet paper in a tree every 50m to find your way back to the fire trail?
OK, now that that rant is over and done with on to the walk. Jim had suggested this walk down to Wheeny Creek and back, an area that we hadn’t been to before. Cheryl and Matt joined us.
The first 7k of the walk was along a nicely graded fire trail, on the way out it seemed nice and flat but, on the way back, there were far more hills than I remembered.
Once we were off the fire trail, the track was nicely defined down through nice open terrain. When I call it nicely or well defined, it means that the vegetation and dead leaves are really compacted, so that it’s dead easy to see where you should go.
Lovely open forest.
Getting close to the gorge, we can see the hills on the other side of the creek.
We then moved into beautiful rainforest (and leeches) closer to the creek.
In short order we were in the creek and again, there was a well-defined track even through the boulders of the creek taking us to the gorge. Very nice!
The gorge is well known for its waterfalls, we crossed over and dropped down into the creek looking for the next waterfall.
Looking back up the gorge.
At the bottom of the waterfall.
The next waterfall, and its massive pool. This wall had definitely exceeded all of our expectations.
Cheryl (and her beanie) dived right in! The water was a little cold, neither Matt nor I were at all interested in going for a swim.
Jim and Cheryl at the waterfall.
They look like they’re having fun. I can still remember the days when I would have been under the waterfall with them – I’ve become too soft.
It took us until lunchtime to get to the gorge and after the swim (for Jim and Cheryl), we made a beeline back to the track.
It was a 300m elevation walk back up to the fire trail and then a slog back to the cars, I was stuffed by the end. Matt was logging our track but then he lost the data, but from what I recall, it was roughly a 16k round trip.
Big thanks to Jim for putting the walk on and thanks to Cheryl and Matt for joining Jim and me. It was a great fitness walk, I was stuffed at the end!
Banner: a lovely grouping of carnivorous plants Drosera spatulata aka Sundews, these ones have pin-head sized flowers on the end of long stems.