Those of us with sedentary white collar office jobs are always being told by our GPs that we should get more exercise, its good for our health, they say! Regular exercise is good for our cardio-vascular systems, good for our mental health too, good for our general well-being. This is without a doubt self-evidently true, and personally I find one of the best ways of exercising is to bushwalk. What I find especially appealing about this activity is that it combines prolonged strenuous physical exercise with something of great aesthetic value, the beauty and tranquility of the bush itself (providing an ideal escape valve for all us stressed and cramped urban dwellers from the big smoke). So, while bushwalking is undeniably healthy to body and soul, the other side of the coin is that it can be fraught with danger if you are go in unprepared, if you overreach yourself, intentionally or otherwise, in the environment of the bush – as the following cautionary tale seeks to show.
Day 1
It started as little more than a modest stroll in the (national) park, a bit of exercise walking along an unfamiliar track that gave no portend of any dark forebodings. I had explored the western stretch of the Florabella Pass track from Warrimo the week before, and on this trip I wanted to familiarise myself with the eastern part of the track winding back to the Blaxland shopping centre. On the western section of the track, along the Florabella Creek, I observed a number of wild flowers, but had read on the NSW Bushwalking site that the Blaxland part of the track had a greater variety of flora, including angophoras, lilly pillys and flannel flowers. A nascent botanical interest however wasn’t my motive for this day’s bush excursion. Rather, it was an exploratory trip in preparation for a walk I was to lead for SBG the following Sunday from Warrimo to Blaxland stations. It was a mere 3 kilometres in distance to the midway point. I walked down from the heights of Ross Crescent which marks the start of the track, passing a family with young children taking a New Year’s Day’s look-see at the view offered by the high bush track. They were perched at the junction between the right-hand trail and the main track and seemed undecided about which way to go. I stopped briefly and talked to them, even proffering advice on where each track led – in hindsight my giving counsel to someone else was to prove a rich irony given my experience that week in the bush! But more of that later…further down the track I passed a single walker in the opposite direction, I did not know it at the time (about 10:30-11am) but this was to be the last human I would see or hear for almost three-and-a-half days!
I checked out a couple of the offshoot trails, one going along Pippas Pass for a bit and another to Plateau Point, to see where they led (back to suburbia). I backtracked and proceeded west up the narrow, tree-lined mountainous track. When I reached the Glenbrook Creek side trail sign, I turned back, satisfied that I had now covered (over two trips) the full 6.5 kilometre distance of the upcoming walk, and that I was prepared and ready for any contingencies (the folly of such confidence would be completely exposed by what was to come). I was well advanced on my journey back to my starting point when I happened upon a little siding to the main track. Consulting my copy of the ‘Blue Mountains Best Bushwalks’ guide, I noted that it indicated a diversion here. I became curious about this sidetrack. The guidebook suggested it was an alternative route to get to the swimming holes further down the creek, which had been one of the stops I had scheduled for the walk on Sunday. The guidebook did offer the warning that this was a hazardous route, but given the intense heat of the day I found the promise of a shortcut to the waterholes too enticing to resist. Hindsight tells me that I should have taken the safe and sure ‘official’ route, but as Oscar Wilde once observed, temptation is the hardest thing to say no to!
The way down to the lower, creek level was via a rusty old white ladder, I hovered at the top examining the ladder for several minutes before tentatively climbing onto the top of it. There were large, gaping holes where it had corroded away and the bottom three rungs had gone all together. I got down to the last remaining rung and sparred out my left leg into thin air, trying to gauge whether I could safely drop down the distance – a good two metres – to the ground. In the end, I decided it was too risky and retreated back up to the top. Giving the ladder idea up as a bad bet, I scouted round for other, less risky options and eventually found another vertical path down that was testing but manageable. I scrambled down the muddy, slippery slope to an intermediate hill, and from there was able to half-slide and half-run down the remaining slopes to a cleared area of the creek level ground.
I explored the immediate region of the creek on both sides. After hunting around the far side bush for a while, I gained a sense that the creek valley was deserted. The water in the creek didn’t look all that flash, but as it was pretty hot, I took a quick dip in it and it’s cool water at least refreshed me. In going down into the remote creek area in the first place, I was relying on the accuracy of the bushwalking guide, but the further I went, the more I began to question it’s reliability.
At the outset I had anticipated a short hike on a reasonably navigable path leading to the swimming holes, but this was fast turning into an illusion. My attempts to travel along the side of the creek met with fierce resistance from the dense, out-of-control bush on both sides of the creek. There was no defined track of any sort, the way ahead was indistinct. In front of me, each way I turned there was thick undergrowth and dense vegetation. Stretching from the creek bank right up to the hilltop, everywhere you looked, there was a pervasive, feral overgrowth. I observed a hodgepodge of prickly bushes, stinging plants, hooking vines, ferns and palms, all growing randomly. My task from here, which I unwisely chose to accept, was to try to find (or manufacture) the optimal way through this tangle of nature, whilst trying to minimise the damage inflicted on my person.
Despite walking for hours in the sun I had not sighted the purported swimming holes at all. Frustrated at the non-materialisation of a way out, I eventually opted to head back in to where I began. As I moved in the direction of the Florabella Creek junction, I made an effort to scan the horizon on the north-east side of the creek to try to get a sighter of the upper track, from which I had unwisely strayed several hours before. If I could at least see the track, I thought that I might be able to figure out a way up to the top. The problem with this was that the canopy on the hillside was both very cluttered and very high, making it nigh on impossible to see the track from ground or creek level.
It’s an intriguing omission on my part but all the time I was immersed in the impenetrable bushland, I can honestly say I was not concerned at the danger, potential or actual, that the park’s wild fauna might pose. Of course, I was aware that there would be snakes, spiders, leeches, ticks and other bush nasties around the place, but as my journey became more and more protracted, I became so fixated on getting out of the mess I had entangled myself in, that I didn’t really give any consideration to the presence of these other natural threats.
It was about this point in time that I should have been acknowledging the folly of what I had done, going off-plan and hopelessly off-track. Instead, I kept telling myself that everything was OK (I was probably still deceiving myself that I was in control of my destiny). The unpalatable truth being that, as I have always done in unfamiliar surrounds, I was trying to mask a significant shortcoming for a bushwalker – that I am not great with directions, not so woefully deficient that I could not get a job as a Sydney taxi driver, but distinctly ordinary nonetheless. Here, in the homogeneous and concentrated landscape of overgrown bushes and tall trees, my internal compass was certainly not functioning in anything remotely resembling a stellar fashion.
About 6pm I reluctantly admitted to myself that I was lost, or at least not found, and decided to phone emergency. I spent an hour, maybe as much as an hour-and-a-half ringing 000, occasionally getting through but more often the phone would cut out. A pattern developed where the call would go through, Triple 0 would ask who I wanted, I would indicate Police, they would patch me through and I could hear the voice on the other end, but they apparently couldn’t hear me, then the line would go dead. I estimated I made, lost count, maybe 25 unsuccessful attempts at contacting them. A couple of times the phone rang back straight after I had dialled and then lost the call, but the line went dead as soon as I answered. At least from this, I drew some comfort from the thought that the authorities were apparently aware of my existence, and perhaps had traced my location. The brief appearance of a helicopter circling around overhead just before nightfall encouraged me to be positive about my situation.
At this juncture I still fully expected to find the bush track before dark. But doubts were starting to gnaw away at my confidence. What if I didn’t find a way out by nightfall, I asked myself? No one would know to look for me, let alone where to look. I thought about the people whose house I parked in front of, right at the entrance to the bush track in Ross Crescent, if I didn’t return that night, surely they would raise the alarm, after all they must see Florabella Track walkers parking outside their house all the time? A voice in my head came back to me bluntly saying “probably not”, It told me that I couldn’t assume this, the people in the bush-backed house may be used to hikers parking their cars there and going off camping for a few nights, so a vehicle camped there overnight wouldn’t necessarily send a warning signal to vigilant locals.
By 7pm I had consumed the last remaining drop of the paltry 950ml of water I had brought. I trudged on towards the, by this time, seemingly mythical pools. My legs were being constantly assaulted by myriad of briar, bramble and other assortment of prickly, thorny shrubbery, most aggravating were the vines (bush vines, lawyer vines, the common garden-variety vine, all sorts) at just above ground level, these were super-efficient at constantly managing to twirl themselves around one or the other of my lower legs just as I was trying to climb though a gap in the bushes or climb over a horizontal tree trunk. The vines continually slowed my progress and it was incredibly energy-sapping to try to free myself from their wrestler-like hold time and again.
Finding the thick terrain and bush almost impenetrable on one side of the creek, I crossed over to the far side and continued, but still with enormous difficulty. After a hour of struggling through, under, over and around the overgrown bushes and plants, I came upon a sign in the midst of an entanglement of bushes and undergrowth. The sign, almost obscured by the thick undergrowth, proclaimed a ‘Track’, which considering its position, which was adjacent to nowhere, seemed like it was the product of someone’s bizarre vein of humour!
About 8:15 I stumbled on to a sandbank next to the creek and crashed from exhaustion. After resting a while I walked on for fifteen metres to an adjoining, larger sandbank which appeared in the dark to rest on a large pool of water. I assumed this was the elusive swimming holes I had been searching for. At the end of the strip of sand was more a patch of thick, dense bush, by now clouded in blackness. Despite the comparative comfort of the sandbar, I was keen to get in front of the pools to be in a good position first thing in the morning to make a quick exit from the heavily forested labyrinth. Buoyed by my ‘discovery’, I ventured into the adjacent bush in total darkness. With no torchlight, I didn’t get very far before stubbing my toes, getting numerous scratches on my legs to add to the ones I had acquired earlier, and then capped it off by crashing over a large unseen and unseeable boulder, coming thundering to the ground with a thud, my ribcage in screaming agony having landed flush on the sharp point of a very large, round rock. I lay flat on the ground for a couple of minutes regathering my breath, all the time wincing in pain. I dragged myself slowly to my feet, and backtracked my steps, hastily in my mind but very cautiously in practice. Finding the relative safety of the sandbank once again, I flopped down, this time for the night.
I was so enervated by the tribulations of the day that, in a short time, I did drift off to sleep for maybe two hours, tops. When I woke, in pitch dark, cold, my ribs in pain, the noises of the night took over my consciousness. Above all, the constant, deafening roar of the cicadas’ tymballic chorus, accompanied by the periodical buzz of the mosquito and the occasional sound of short, sharp ripples from the creek. Despite the softness of the sand, it was a long uncomfortable and boring night. I couldn’t get back to sleep, it was too cold and miserable on the open sand. All I could do was wait, count the minutes and then the hours … waiting, waiting for the first light of day, the dark sky seemed like it would never lighten. Wearing only a thin Egyptian cotton T-shirt and shorts, during the night I was shivering at times uncontrollably from the cold of the open air. I tried to bury my feet in the sand to keep them warm but this provided only at best minor respite. I have never been as relieved to see the dawn break as on this morning.