Bowens Creek North Branch, Lower Section

[Bowens Creek North Branch, Lower Section aka Gobsmacker Canyon]

Originally Anton has a list of 4-5 friends who were interested, but most dropped out leaving Pat as the last boy standing. Since I now knew that it was a short canyon we departed at the leisurely time of 7:30am and Pat’s Dad Martin decided to join us at the last minute.

We set off for the canyon at 9:35am, leaving Pat and Anton to navigate.

This time around, I decided that I’d be able to spend some time doing a bit of Photo Pfaffery so stopped a few times on the way down to take some snaps of the beautiful ferny gully. There’s a few more fern shorts in the gallery.

We got the junction at around 11:00am, suited up and got to the first abseil at 11:25am - knowing that the jump was good based on the previous trip most of us jumped and Pat decided to clamber around the side.

The first real abseil is in a beautiful situation - I was hoping to get some better shots of the waterfall, but unfortunately there simply wasn’t as much water in the canyon this time. So here’s a shot of Pat being belayed by Anton instead.

Last time around I concentrated on GoPro footage of the main abseil through the middle of the waterfall. Well, I still did take some footage - check out the video clip later on. This time I concentrated on getting some nice snaps of the waterfall. Setting up the SLR was somewhat challenging as I had to place the trip on a submerged rock and gingerly pull the SLR out and set it up without it going for a swim. Here’s Martin trying to be really still for 4 seconds but not really succeeding. Anton did a better job as can be seen on the first image of this blog.

Anton and Pat having an Epic Fail at standing still for 5 seconds.

We got to the lunch spot at the junction of North and South Bowens at around 1:05pm, where Martin spotted something I had never seen before - twin whirlpools!!

A leisurely lunch was had and then we headed up the exit gully arriving back at the cars at 3:00pm, which gave us heaps of time to drop into Kurrajong Heights for a quick Ale before heading home.