❝An adventure is only an inconvenience rightly considered.
An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered.❞

~ G K Chesterton

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Suddenly, another voice broke the bush silence, away to the left in front of me, the same voice it seemed as before…maybe. I had only just splashed water from the creek onto my parched lips a minute or two earlier, but they were already dry again…with a renewed sense of purpose I repeated the action, slowly and deliberately spreading the water around my mouth in a massaging motion with my tongue. Composing myself and pursing my lips, I took a deep breath and mustered all of the remaining strength in my now croaky and feeble vocal cords. Starting with a whisper I tried screaming out, “Hello! HELLO, HEL-L-O-O-O, down here in the creek!”.

I strangely felt like I was trying to learn to speak all over again…mercifully by the third ‘hello’ the utterance had become stronger in pitch and reasonably audible. A silence followed – seemingly agonisingly long but only fleeting in actual time lapsed – then a reciprocal greeting from the direction of the bush hinterland. I expect my heart skipped a beat at that very moment with a sheer and unbridled sense of relief…yes! I couldn’t see anyone but “the voice” indicated that I should stay put and he would come down to where I was.

Seconds passed, maybe thirty-forty seconds, “the voice” was now silent. My mind, still rushing at 100 miles an hour, was in such a state that I was thrust into freefall panic mode…he’d stopped communicating with me, my immediate fear: he might just vanish again into the harsh bush scape, never to reach me and my lifeline to the outside world would be dashed once more! A cacophony of doubts were assailing my brain. I had such a heightened sense of anxiety, at that moment the most important thing in the world seemed to be to maintain a constant dialogue with my would-be ‘saviour’! Panicked, I just started calling out to him, “hello, are you there?” again and again, until finally he reciprocated – my relief was tangible!

I figured by the sound of his voice that he appeared to be about 20 metres or so from where I was in the creek, but it took an agonisingly long time for him to make his way down. Several more minutes went by, during which I could hear his boots crunching his way through the rugged and inhospitable bush. He must have had to zig-zag through, around, under and over countless dense scrubs and branches. I waited and watched anxiously for him to appear, until finally he came into my line of vision. He was indeed a welcome sight to behold, the first human I had sighted since the previous Wednesday.

I blurted out the long story-short of my inglorious bush escapade to him. He looked like a fit-looking, stocky young bushwalker, so I could only imagine how much of a complete bush neophyte I must have seemed to him. He reassured me that he and his friends had food and water with them – the word ‘water’ resonated singularly with me (I didn’t experience any cravings for food during my entire ordeal, but my thirst, my desire, for water, was all consuming).

His companions were still winding their way down to the creek bank and didn’t appear for several more minutes. The guy, having emerged from the brush, stepped confidently like an experienced bushman onto one of the large rocks in the creek. He motioned towards a clearing in the bush behind me where he said he could lay out the much needed refreshments from his back-pack. As he led the way, striding purposefully and confidently over the wet rocks …to my complete surprise he suddenly slipped as if on a banana skin and landed half on the rocks and half in the water with an all-mighty thud! I was now anxious for me and him (at least I was no longer alone in my plight!). With real concern for my putative rescuer I checked on his well-being, to my relief he quickly responded that yes he was fine. The shock of seeing him being rent asunder like that left me with a singular jarring thought that had instantly and indelibly imprinted itself in my brain: Jesus!, this guy is going to rescue me! He can’t make it from one side of a 12 foot wide creek to the other without losing his feet and falling slap bang on his arse!?! His dramatic and spectacular fall didn’t exactly install me with confidence as to his credentials as a would-be rescuer. If it wasn’t so serious I would have laughed out loud at that point (probably hysterically) … but in truth it merely underscored just how ultra-treacherous the uneven and obscured creek floor was.

On the safety of firm, dry ground I gulped down the bottle of water provided by my would-be rescuer who identified himself as Nathan. It wasn’t cold, lukewarm at best, but who’s complaining, I was just delighted to get liquid into my depleted system, my kidneys were busy thanking him! I drank a second bottle in equally rapid time. His companions (his wife and his workmate) had by now joined us. Lauren, his wife, offered me carrot sticks and a muesli bar for sustenance, I took them out of politeness and nibbled a bit at a thin carrot in a disinterested way. Water was the only revival fuel that I could contemplate at that precise moment.

As I took some nourishment and slowly started to revive, Nathan delivered some news that astounded me: there was a path, right there where we stood (it was hardly discernible to me but I must have passed it several times whilst trudging east and west) which would take us back up the bushy hillside to the Ross Crescent exit, where my car, and as it turned out, their car, were both parked, 15 metres apart! Amazing! Although Ross Crescent wasn’t far away, it appeared in my depleted condition a very steep and arduous ascent, and seemingly interminable. I was surprised at how drained I now felt despite the sustenance – possibly this was because having been ‘saved’ I had relaxed with relief and the strain of my ordeal had finally had its full and debilitating impact on me…my mental exhaustion had finally caught up with my physical exhaustion!

In any case my energy reserves were completely shot. My personal go-to response in most situations is a characteristic “No, I’m OK” (even if I wasn’t!), but now I couldn’t summon up even the slightest pretence of self-reliance or self-sufficiency, I needed Nathan’s firm guiding arm to pull me up the hill. Every ten or so steps, I had to stop and greedily gulp from Nathan’s bottle of Powerade. I was so eager to rehydrate my system that I was swilling the Powerade down, oblivious of the fact that electrolyte-based beverages are supposed to be sipped slowly. Nathan kept reassuring me that it was not far to the top, not far now, he would intone. Somehow I was not convinced by his earnest entreaties. It seemed far to me, interminably so! Every step I took was a trial of effort, it took an inordinate amount of time till we finally and painstakingly reached the second tier from the top. By now I was well on the way to polishing off Nathan’s second bottle of Powerade!

At this high spot on the mountain, we halted a while because my rescuers wanted to phone the police to report the ‘miracle’ of my rescue. When Nathan got through to the police he informed them of the circumstance and an unwieldy three-way conversation ensued – the phone operator would ask questions which Nathan would relay to me and then he would duly repeat my answers back to the officer. Confusion ensured and I soon tired of this proxy communication and insistently took the phone from my rescue-hero and spoke directly to the police staffer who informed me, to my amazement, that they had received no report whatsoever of my being missing in the Blue Mountains over the previous four days. This was quite mind-blowing news because I had been certain that the hovering helicopter I had regularly spotted overhead on days two and three had been looking for me. But it seems I had been truly in it on my ‘Patma’ all along.

All the while I spoke on the mobile, Nathan had been diligently trying to wave away the flies from my battered and bloodied legs. This was a considerate gesture on his part, but I motioned to him, don’t bother! After all that I had gone through, I just didn’t care anymore about such a minor irritation which I had long since become used to. Let the bloodsucking bugs do their worst, I was out of the nightmarish bush imbroglio, that was all that mattered now. At this juncture I was pretty fed up with the whole experience and just wanted to go home. The police had no report on me, I was qui nihil interest to them (a person of no interest). I was somewhat incredulous, I felt like persona non grata, but also relieved at finding out I was free to go home.

Nathan did his upmost to try to persuade me to go to Nepean Hospital to get checked out. I politely demurred at this suggestion, protesting that I was fine (maybe an egregious overstatement on my part, I would concede) and perfectly capable of driving home. Relieved to get out of the trap I had dug myself into, I now wanted only to get home, get into a hot bath, pour in some epsom salts and Dettol, relax, veg out for a couple of hours and “lick my wounds” – psychic and physical. The question of the damage I had sustained to the various parts of my body, I was prepared to put on the back burner for the time being. Of course I had some concerns about my back and the possible dire implications for my spine (and, less anxiously, for my ribcage), but as my back wasn’t causing me any significant pain at this time aside from the occasional spasms since the accident, I resolved to address the medical issues later. Self-indulgence in the form of a luxuriant soaking, followed by sleep, was what I craved most right now. After further debate, in the end we reached a compromise, I agreed to Nathan’s firm insistence that he drive me home in my car (to make sure that I was all right, he said) and Lauren and friend John would follow in their car.

Before we pushed on up the steep last leg of the vertical track, I had another swig or three of Nathan’s crimson-coloured Powerade. With the firm arm of Nathan to guide me, I very tenderly and slowly hobbled on, up and up yet more steps. In my present state of mental and physical attrition, it seemed like an unending track. Nathan kept reassuring me that it wasn’t far (he had said the same thing ten minutes before!). He indicated with a wave of the hand that the tops of the houses in Ross Crescent had come into sight, I looked and couldn’t see them, but took some comfort from the confident tone of his voice. When we got on to level ground at the top, I recognised the long, rectangular, fenceless property on the right, in front of which would be my car (at least I was hoping it was still there!). Only when I saw the sign marking the beginning of Florabella Track, did I allow myself the thought that, finally, yes, my four day ordeal was over. Across from the sign, sitting patiently for the last 78 hours was indeed my little red Colt. No one had seemed to notice it had been unattended for a protracted amount of time, not the people inside the house, not even any curious, other locals. If anyone did observe it, they perhaps only gave it a passing thought, maybe concluding that it was yet another abandoned vehicle in the bush (there were two such disowned cars residing, more of less permanently, at the Warrimo end of the same track). And, to add a further irony to my predicament, there, just a few steps away from the Colt was the car of my ‘predestined’ rescuers.

First stop as we departed the scene in our respective vehicles was the nearest servo where I filled up on bottled water and, of course, Coca Cola (my long-nurtured hopes for Pepsi dashed as the servo outrageously didn’t stock the brand!). Travelling back to the Inner West, Nathan and I passed time by talking discursively about various topics, cultural norms, politics and religion to name three (my youthful rescuer a little too eagerly disclosed his weekend volunteer role preaching scripture groups at his local church). Nathan also mentioned that John and he were both posties, as was his wife’s father (an altogether charm-free dolt who I had the brief displeasure of meeting when we quickly stopped at Penrith on the way back home). When I heard that my deliverers from the bush imbroglio were all employees (or close relatives) of Australian Post, I exclaimed out loud with a mixture of mirth and relief in my voice, “My God! Saved by Posties!” That brought a laugh to Nathan’s face.

We finally set off from Penrith for the last part of the drive home. It was to take longer than I had hoped though, wife and friend couldn’t keep up with us or kept getting lost and we had to keep stopping and wait for them to catch up…my well of patience was tested but what could I do, I reassured myself that after everything that had happened I could wait a bit longer).

In any event Nathan was there to engagingly “chew the cud” with me or at least to distract me from the episodic twinges of pain I was feeling! In the course of the drive somehow the topic of religion came up again (what a surprise!). Without any prompting Nathan launched into a mini monologue-cum-(polite) rant on the strength of his Christian faith. Over the next half hour or so I got a sampler of Nathan’s doctrinal ideas about religion…such as his belief in the overarching concept of an intelligent design guiding the creation of the world, not to forget his notion of a ‘selective’ God. As he spoke more and more enthusiastically about his preoccupation I muttered sotto voco to myself, “Christ, not just saved by Posties, saved by Religious Posties!” I mused on my new ‘predicament’: here’s Nathan getting full flight into his preaching spiel and his two, no doubt fellow evangelists, following us close behind by car – had I been ‘saved’ from existential peril in the wilderness only to find myself thrust into a world of sanctimonious but friendly God Botherers!

Was I, once again trapped—this time inside my own car—with a well-mannered religious wacko who was going to try to convert me? Not withstanding such misgivings, I was chilled enough after re-hydrating myself to sit back in the passenger seat and let Nathan drone on to his heart’s content. And he did not disappoint, waxing spiritually about the various theological beliefs he was eager to espouse at every given opportunity. Nathan had more than a whiff of the incipient zealot about him and didn’t need any prompting to expand on his heart-felt moral and religious beliefs. I was just happy to relax and re-energise my batteries. Before the journey’s end I had amble evidence to believe that Nathan was decidedly of the “God speaks to me” garden variety of evangelical kooks.

After a period of sitting passively and silently listening to his constant chatter, I couldn’t help myself, even in my diminished state, from engaging with him and playing the “Devil’s Advocate” card (yes I admit, an altogether naturally comfortable role for me!). I brought up one or two of the big religious imponderables, such the contradiction between God’s omnipotence and the stark, unjust realities of the world – the desperate, miserable condition of life for the vast majority of the planet. I posed the question “Why does God allow such an intolerable and horrific situation to exist when he had has all the power he needs to intercede on behalf on the downtrodden?” (In Nathan’s Church God is definitely a he!), giving Nathan’s enough slack on the line to really get his theological teeth into that juicy morsel. As expected, Nathan of course had an explanation for this, a very good one, he added confidently. “Its like this Bruce” Nathan began, with the slightly patronising tone of the “good shepherd” in his voice, and proceeded to recount a puzzling analogy: God, he affirmed, “was like a dentist who would refuse any further service to patients if they neglected to pay their bills”!

In so far as I was prepared to go to try to uncoil the enigma wrapped in a puzzle that was his logic, it seemed for Nathan to boil down to a question of God saving only those who exhibit sufficient faith in him – if I was following him correctly…hallelujah! Craftily if predictably, Nathan managed to avoid directly dealing with the imponderable issue of why an all-powerful and presumably all-caring God would ever allow any suffering, let alone the global epidemic proportions that exist in the world today? As would be expected for “true believers” like Nathan, one needs to search no further than a reaffirmation of faith for the answer, no room for a skerrick of doubt here!

By the time Nathan had pronounced on a few more of his doctrinal hobbyhorses we had reached our ‘destination’ (given my agnosticism-cum-atheism, mine, at least in the ultimate sense, unlike Nathan’s, was obviously not going to be ‘Heaven’). My growing realisation that evangelist Nat and his companions were devotees of what was possibly some kind of fringe evangelical whacko sect did not detract in any way from the genuine and heartfelt gratitude I felt for these three young bush explorers who were definitely in the right place at the right time as far as I was concerned.

On the drive back down the M4, I had waved a $50 note (not having anything smaller!) in Nathan’s direction as a tangible manifestation of gratitude and as recompense for the petrol he would have to use, but he clearly demurred from accepting it. I sensed that putting himself in God’s “Pearly Gates” book for the performing of such a good deed was Nathan’s most coveted reward. After some ritualistic toing and front, me insisting he take it and he declining, he eventually took the $50 and placed it in the dashboard, inferring that we could engage in a dialogue later regarding it(!). A later conversation? I wondered…between me and him? Between God and him or between all three of us? How many were there in this car? It’s only a small hatchback! It was becoming confusing.

Whilst we waited in the car outside my home for Lauren and John’s car to catch up, I managed to turn one of Nathan’s pious homilies on its head and put it to him that he accept the money as an equitable act of faith (whatever that means?!?). God must have signalled his approval of this compromise solution because Nathan relented and slipped the ‘portrait’ of Edith Cowan into his wallet, saying he would put the cash towards he and his wife’s petrol kitty. Fine by me! I profusely thanked my young Australia Post bush rescue team again for their ever so timely intervention. Australia Post, for once transcending rhetoric, really did deliver on this occasion!

After my saviours(sic) had departed I shed and discarded my one remaining boot and hobbled gingerly barefoot into my unit. I felt ratchet, completely stuffed, hardly surprising after four days openly exposed to the elements. I replenished my stocks with water, juices and a little bit of food (I still wasn’t hungry after four days lost in the woods and didn’t regain my appetite for a couple of days). I ran a hot, soothing bath, lowering myself slowly into it and sighed. I then proceeded to gently pour disinfected water over my numerous cuts and scratches, before moving on to my lower back and ribcage to apply a heated water treatment to them.

As I soaked my aching bones, I pondered the question of how I had survived my extreme encounter with nature. I had gone (suicidally?) solo into the bush, I had not informed anyone beforehand as to my intended location, I had no map (not one worthy of the name anyway!), I had gone off-track, I was way too lightly dressed for nights in the cold and without blanket or covering of any kind, and I had taken a woefully inadequate amount of water and no food with me. I had no flare gun to alert potential rescuers of my whereabouts. And, I had injured myself, albeit not so to imperil my survival, although it could easily have been thus. In short, I had done ALL of the wrong things by the bushwalking manual (and the “common sense” manual too!), coming across like a complete tyro, but still managed to survive – somehow.

For weeks after, everyone I divulged my Blue Mountains misadventure to, were only too happy to apply, with full ironic intent, the ‘Bear Grylls’ tag to me! Obviously, a large slice of luck had come down on my side. Having bungled my way into the densely-foliated abyss, and then ineptly and laughingly attempted to extricate myself without success, I clearly needed some sort of effective external intervention to happen. Finding people on the fourth day who were well equipped to salvage what remained of me at a most timely and critical point, could only be described as my good fortune! There are other ways of viewing how I had managed to endure in the bush, if you want to imbue it with sentiment. A close friend who I recounted the story to, marvelled like everyone else at my survival (that is, at my good luck) and commented that it was my late wife looking after me – well, whatever, it’s a nice thought, isn’t it?

When I went for a physical check-up two days later, Dr Phil my GP asked perhaps jokingly, perhaps only half jokingly, if I had a death wish. Freud defined the death wish (or ‘death drive’, more precisely he called it) as an unconscious desire for self-destruction. Well, if it is an unconscious state, then who could ever say definitely? But given my erratic behaviour over the whole episode of the four day bush misadventure, it may well seem to an objective third party that I did.

If you examine the bare bones of it, I went out into the great unknown unprepared, without a Plan B. In my conscious mind, I was definitely not trying to put myself in harm’s way, nothing deliberate, no attempt to test my physical and psychological boundaries. By disposition I am far from being an adrenalin junkie deriving a buzz from putting my safety on the line. Extreme risk sports or activities of your bungy-jumping or base-jumping kind do not appeal to me! I am no ‘funambulator’ (tight-rope walker) in any sense of the word, by nature my “Caledonian cautious” approach to life would preclude me, 99 times out of every 100, from putting my body on the line. The last few days were obviously occurrence number 100!

My predicament was one that I just inadvertently stumbled into, unprepared and unanticipated. I hadn’t planned to end up in the hazardous part of the bush that I did, so I had no contingencies in place to deal with the unpredictable. It could so easily have been a mortal mistake. I survived, I’m still not sure how, but it did teach me the invaluable lesson that if you underestimate the bush, or are complacent about it, even for a moment, you will do so at your peril.

Footnote:
Later that night the mystery of the patrolling helicopter was revealed on the evening news. It transpired that the copter (and the other light plane) I had seen were scouring the area for a group involved in an abseiling accident nearby…an abseiler in his early 30s had fallen to his death heroically trying to rescue his girlfriend who had ‘frozen’ and was stranded immobile on a cliff ledge. It was a sobering thought as I reflected afterwards: I had somehow survived my fall, at the same time this poor, unfortunate guy trying to be the Good Samaritan, trying to do the right and noble thing, tragically did not share my good and perhaps undeserved luck.

Day 4

A third night spent listening to the nocturnal sounds of the local fauna in lieu of sleeping, swatting away the extremely-irritating and ubiquitous culicidae and counting the multiples of each five minutes which were ticking over ever s-o-o s-l-o-w-l-y. Although my clothes were wet through from the previous afternoon I was not as cold on the sand as the preceding nights. Dare I suggest that I was becoming accustomed to the deprivations of sleeping rough al fresco…if so, it was not a contemplation that I was getting any comfort or reassurance from.

The cold and discomfort of the night and the fear of dehydration were the two motivators that spurred me on to keep striving to find a way out of this bush nightmare. With all that time to kill my thoughts returned again and again to the gaseous elixir that I was craving, that ultimate beacon of hope, the icy bottle of Coca Cola. The enduring solitude of my predicament certainly gave me the space for mind-wandering and my brain was certainly meandering in spectacularly tangential fashion! I speculated on the respective merits of Coke versus Pepsi. At one point, I decided that I would prefer Pepsi to Coke, not sure why really. Possibly it is due to Pepsi being seemingly less of a universal icon than Coke, making it somehow more appealing and desirable than its better known rival – it wasn’t a particularly rational thought process. After further musing, I tried to remember who the celebrities associated with Pepsi were, two I conjured up were Michael Jackson and Elvis. My startling conclusion: Pepsi was the preferred drink of dead people, so it couldn’t be good for you! I quickly distanced myself from the notion of ‘Pepsi-hegemony’ and defaulted once again to Coca Cola. Such was the state of my tired and wildly imaginative mind by now, I was wondering if my ordeal had put me on the verge of becoming borderline delirious? (did I say ‘becoming’?)

I made my (now) usual start at 6am (first light), determined to make this my last day in this off-track hinterland, do or die sort of resolve – although resolve clearly hadn’t worked so far! The brutal fact was that resolve hadn’t been enough, apparently. Each of the previous two mornings I had expressed equal, optimistic determination on starting out – and the results in terms of getting somewhere (ie, ‘out’) were “sweet FA”!

Hampered by the twin burdens of self-doubt and the accumulative effects of exhaustion from lack of sleep, I moved at a laborious pace…initially across the sloping terrain, and then when that got too arduous I reverted to my previous alternating strategy of swapping over to the creek and wading through the water. Travelling through the creek seemed even more hazardous than it had been on the three preceding days. I stepped through the water with great caution, aware that my fatigue level made me more prone to lose my footing. In deeper water I crawled at snail’s pace along the creek floor, my eyes constantly searching through the murky water in front of me for the presence of submerged logs and rocks. Despite my diligence, every few minutes or so I would inevitably crash painfully into one of these hidden obstacles and add to my already impressive tally of minor scratches and cuts (scars of battle with nature? If so, I definitely seemed to be losing the war!)

On narrow rock platforms I would edge my way along them, but again because I could see not far beneath the surface, I regularly came a-cropper when the platform suddenly ended, resulting in my plunging into 10 foot deep water. My non-waterproof backpack was inundated with creek water every time this happened, it’s contents, primarily my mobile phone and bushwalking guidebook (which got me into this fix in the first place! Duh!) had long since been rendered inoperative. The quality of the water in Glenbrook Creek was of a very uneven nature, in the free-flowing parts it looked quite OK. However not pristine like the springs down the road in the Magdala Creek Falls near Springwood (where, somewhere, I barely knew what was where by this point!). Much of Glenbrook Creek exhibited a reddish or rust-coloured tinge. At the parts of the creek where the current was slowed by clumps of large rocks, the water had a whitish sludge which coalesced into patches on the surface.

Water not worth bottling …

There was no sign of the rescue copter until late in the morning, and even then, it was in a quite distant part of the national park from where I was. I was even more convinced now that I was “Robinson Crusoe,” in all senses of the term – stranded and utterly alone, and more gravely, solely responsible for my own survival. The intense heat of the day was having its effect on me faster than on earlier mornings. Treading my way carefully up the creek, I could feel the back of my neck reddening after only an hour or so. Because of the intense heat I had to stop more than on the other days and take the occasional dip in the creek to refresh myself before struggling on. It was now well over three days since I last heard a human voice. Occasionally, I would mistake the gurgling sound of the tumbling waters for incoherent voices. This momentarily would pep my spirits up, only to register immediate disappointment when I realised my error. Aside from the falls and the incessant cicadas, I was consigned to endure yet further silence. Even the whirring noise of the copter circling the sky had deserted me, it appeared. I probably didn’t feel more alone during my ordeal than at this point.

One o’clock passed, the journey back to the old (mythical perhaps?) ladder was taking me a lot longer than I had anticipated. Everything had been going in slow motion since I first stumbled into this overgrown underworld. What concerned me most was that I had not yet sighted any of the landmarks that would indicate that I was approaching my objective. I suppose at this point I had reached my lowest ebb, I had not found the promised exit route at the swimming holes, I had not rediscovered the old ladder…the doubts in my mind about surviving were growing stronger as I was growing weaker.

Someone, one of the many interested interrogators who found my tale incredulous, later on asked me if at any time during the ordeal I had thoughts that this was it, that maybe I was going to die here. Of course I did! I could picture myself in a sort of “deadman walking” scenario. More so as each day passed, but I would always dismiss the thought each time just as quickly because I had to keep as positive a frame of mind as I could to find that one, hidden way out. I just knew I wasn’t going to give up, I’d rather die trying!

Later on, after I had rejoined the man-made world, a doctor (my GP actually) bizarrely asked, whilst he poked and prodded me, if my desperation ever got to the point where I contemplated lighting a bush fire to attract the attention of the State Rescue Service! I had spoken before of an element of delirium invading my senses, but mercifully my desperate thoughts never went to this ‘solution'(sic). Even if I had arrived at such a loopy notion, I could never bring myself to do something so extreme and irresponsible, no matter how desperate I was! For one thing a raging bush fire could just as easy engulf me in the out-of-control inferno I had created! So, no fires or similar “hare-brained doctor” notions, but I did many times curse the fact that I had not put something useful in my empty backpack – like say signal flares.

The very real and growing concerns I had about becoming dehydrated forced me to debate with myself the pros and cons of drinking from the creek. No, it wouldn’t taste great, more seriously it would probably make me sick if I swallowed any sizeable amount of the highly questionable water. Conversely, I couldn’t survive indefinitely without water. Dilemma! I resolved to collect some water in my remaining empty plastic bottle, not to drink any time soon, but to store as an emergency last resort measure. To counteract the immediate parched feeling of my mouth, I allowed myself the luxury of applying the water to my dry mouth, giving me some modicum of temporary comfort whilst avoiding swallowing any measurable quantity.

I thought I heard a noise, but this time it wasn’t the noise of the cicadas, nor the sound of the rushing water running away from the falls. I heard it again, it was a human voice – at quite some distance, but discernible none the less. I stopped dead in the creek waters so as to listen more intently. Over the preceding three days of my entrapment I had been fooled several times by the babbling sound of the falling waters bisecting a mass of rocks, mistaking this for the sound of incoherent voices. The voice I heard now though was more audibly human, with a linguistic structure to it. I could almost make out distinct words being uttered, the timbre of a strong male voice talking to someone else (I assumed), a monologue of sorts. I gathered myself together and with great effort hurried my progress as best as I could. The voice, a miracle sound to my ears now, was on my left but a fair way ahead of where I was. I needed to catch up, shorten the distance between myself and the trailing sound which represented rekindled hope. Suddenly, there was silence, and then I heard the same voice again, it sounded like someone enunciating authoritatively on a subject – how strange!

I composed myself, mustering up what energy I could, and shouted in the direction of the voice. My attempts at shouting were a bit muted owing to my state of dehydration. I wet my lips from the turgid water I was standing in, and tried again. Louder, but still far from authoritative or even emphatic. No response from the bushes. Then, I stopped hearing the voice. The voice had disappeared, and with it, my momentary and tenuous reconnection with the human world. A false hope? My hopes had been momentarily raised and then instantly thwarted, crushed, eviscerated. Nonetheless I felt buoyed by the revelation that there were people in the vicinity of the creek…somewhere, I just needed to find them.

I pushed on imbued with the sense that, maybe, there was light at the end of the tunnel. If there was a group of people out there, tangibly close, then perhaps, there were others as well, and my chances of coming upon someone during the day had received a boost. Was there someone out there with a metaphorical life-jacket with my name on it, hovering frustratingly just out of my reach? Everything was weighing on my finding the answer to that question.

My newfound optimism would have been even greater had I had the presence of mind to think through the implications of it now being Saturday, ie, that more people would be likely to be wandering around different parts of the national park. I trudged on for over half-an-hour, probably for another good forty-five minutes at least, no more voices or even the fragments of human sound. Quite suddenly (I sensed), the silence was telling me that once again I was all alone. The roller-coaster that was my emotions was about to swing round again.

Some time close to 3:00pm I guess, with the heat of the day at its most potent, I was feeling more thirsty than I had been up to that point all day. I allowed myself a few, very tiny, micro-minuscule sips from the bottle of unsavoury creek water. I rationalised that the minute quantity I had consumed so far amounted to a low risk of suffering any ill effects. To go on I knew I needed some kind of liquid in me. I kept going, down the creek, but as each quarter-hour passed, in the back of my mind were the doubts, the nagging thought gnawing away at my confidence…had I had missed my one solitary chance at rescue? There was no guarantee in this deadly dice with nature that there would be a second one.

Day 3

As the night went on…and on, I was cursing the rain, not especially because it was making me cold and wet, I was already cold and totally saturated from walking hip-deep in the creek, but because it was not raining enough for me to get some oral benefit from it. I was hoping that a decent rainfall would lessen the effects of dehydration from which I was suffering, but the light, intermittent drizzle over most of the night barely succeeded in making my lips moist.

The swirling winds of the mountains delivered me the strangest of nights on the rocky heights. Every so often my nostrils would detect the inexplicable whiff of glue (quite strong at times), and this combined with the periodical sound of loud machinery in operation, made me believe there was an industrial plant or factory of some sort not far from the rocky outcrop that I had bedded down on. At times the source of the noise seemed to be very close indeed, as did the train, the sound of which I could also clearly distinguish to the north-east of me. These ‘revelations’ did lift my spirits and the prospect of at last escaping the wilderness trap I was in seemed almost tangible. I sensed I was very close to breaking out, although in my more lucid and realistic moments I tempered this optimism with the sobering reminder that noises at high elevation have a tendency to be carried considerable distances by the wind.

As time passed my mind, deprived of sleep, seemed to lapse into a kind of hallucinatory state. I started to rehearse in my head an almost quixotic scenario by which I would make good my escape. At the first sign of a lightening sky I would struggle up the remaining distance to the peak, crossing over it into ‘civilisation’ and secure my own deliverance by finding a workplace plant of some description (it didn’t have to be precisely that, the key element was that I would find people in some sort of roofed structure!). Obsessively through the rest of the night, I would replay this same, imagined sequence of events whereby I would dramatically emerge from the bush and burst in upon the surprised workers, telling them they have no idea how glad I was to see them, the first humans I have sighted in two days, etc, etc. Startled, they would view me as some sort of wondrous spectre bringing lustre and excitement to their deadly-dull, tedious night shift existences (such was the lyrical degree to which my mind was running wildly off the rails!). I would ask my would-be saviours for water and implore them to drive me back to Ross Crescent where my car was, so I could be on my merry way back to a world of modern indoor conveniences!

In hindsight, I can see that this was merely a fanciful, desperate construct of my mind concocted in hope to shore up my resolve to get the hell out of that accursed bush … to find a “get out of jail” to escape my miserable predicament. Or to view my line of thought from a different angle, this was therapy that I was “self-medicating”, psyching myself up to be in, and stay in, survivor mode … at one point I reminded myself that, unhelpfully, I had never ever watched a single episode of that over-publicised Survivor TV show. Drat! All the useless, mindless television I had watched over the years, and I hadn’t included something that would have been at least a little bit of practical use right now!

Even though this intoxicating ‘vision’ of mine was guileless and implausible to say the very least, it affirmed the extent to which I was determined to save myself (or be saved) by whatever means it took. Constantly running through a best result scenario in my head passed the time on this impossible-to-sleep night, as well as being a device to give myself hope, to keep my spirits up in the midst of such a trying experience. Looking at both Google Maps and Gregory’s later, I could not pinpoint the slightest sign of an industrial plant in the vicinity of where I had been, but there was a large man-made structure, possibly an electricity sub-station, in that proximity which I may have mistaken for a factory of some kind … though the mystery of the strong odour of glue remained just that, a mystery!

The part of my coccyx/tailbone which had impacted so dramatically with the stony ground the previous evening had by this time cooled down and I started feeling a discernible pain which came and went. It was a dull pain centred in the lower back, interspersed over the next 24 hours by occasional sharp stabbing pains … a series of momentary spasms in the middle of the back. Fortunately the pain was not severe enough at this time to hamper my mobility. With the light of day came the bitter, demoralising reality that I was not where I had thought I was, not anywhere near it in fact! The top of the mountain peak was still a long way off and a long way up, and between me and the top was a thick ground cover of undergrowth and high trees.

Disappointed, a feeling I was becoming accustomed to, I hastily revised my plans. I figured that I must have gone a long way past the old ladder and was probably on the mountainous range closer to the Warrimo side of the Florabella track. The only alternative to going up was to return to the creek in order to to retrace my steps to the ladder. Starting on my descent down I was keen to avoid those same sheer vertical cliff-faces which had been my unmaking the night before I had already decided to forgo any chance there might have been of recovering the lost hiking boot on the way down (it would have been the most remote of chances indeed). Heading east I steered a haphazard, zig-zagging course trying to skirt around the stony cliffs and gradually ease myself down a steep embankment to the bottom using the hill’s slender but resilient plant stems as hand brakes.

The dense hillside of course had no human-made path and I had to step my way through, over and past an assortment of fallen logs, bush palms, vines, briar patches and countless other native shrubs and trees. Eventually I found or fashioned a way down the steep hill half-running and half-sliding. Thus far, the blundering, accident-filled wilderness adventure I was experiencing had not sparked any inspired perspicacity on my part, let alone anything resembling an epiphany, but suddenly a fragment of bush survival wisdom flickered within me. I realised that the bush foliage everywhere was still wet from the previous night’s intermittent rain, from this I was to obtain a partial antidote to the dehydration that was overtaking me. Not an especially profound revelation but an immensely practical one in the circumstance!

From that point on, every bush or tree that I laboured past on the way down the hill, I would pause in front of it and shake it for all that it was worth. The spray from the leaves and foliage was eagerly received by my mouth. I had move quickly to get to as many trees as I could before the emerging morning sun dried their foliage. I ‘drank’ from dozens of bushes that I came to, and continued this practice when I reached the creek, supping on the wattles, musky-smelling ferns and other tree higher branches overhanging the creek as I made my way up it. In reality, the quantity of fresh water I absorbed through this method wouldn’t have come close to filling a 250ml bottle, but I think it was important (psychologically as well), maybe even vital, in securing for me some temporary respite from a state of being totally dehydrated.

Buoyed by the rainwater I kept to the creek for a good portion of the day, by now I was finding land progress very heavy going. My steps, two days since I had last eaten or drunk anything other than the small quantity of rainwater, were understandably more lethargic than when I started, plus there was the added, significant disadvantage of being reduced to 50% of my footwear! This in itself made it a very hard, laborious slog, both on land and in the creek. Whether on land or in the creek, clambering over obstacles had become a more arduous exercise with one boot only, especially as it was my left boot that was missing. I hadn’t realised prior to this situation that when climbing over boulders or rocks (or going up generally) I naturally and instinctively led or pushed off with my left leg (a habit I guess that comes from being left-handed?). With only a sock on my left leg I become instantly aware of this trait and how it was a handicap in the circumstances. Getting traction on wet or mossy rocks with a shoeless left foot was hard to do, so I had to kind of painstakingly teach myself there in the bush to lead with my (‘unnatural’) right leg … I found the discipline of this surprisingly difficult to master as instinctively I still wanted to start off each time on my left, the consequence of a lifetime habit of relying on it.

Foot slogging it in the creek brought its own extra burdens courtesy of nature. Walking in the water seemed to attract more pestering insects to myself than when on land. Mosquitos and sandflies of course were ever present but the most persistent annoyances were the large, black bush blowflies. These irritants, which reminded me in appearance of Darth Vader in arthropod form, seemed to be imbued with a large dose of schadenfreude, as they noisily delighted in repeatedly latching on to my open cuts and scratches with blood-sucking precision. Fortunately these insects were slow to react to a counterblow and I managed to squash many a one against my arm or leg whilst trudging upstream.

In my increasingly dire bush predicament, with all the time in the world and nothing or no one to disturb me, I found myself mulling over the oddest notions. Considering my potentially disastrous situation, I marvelled to think that things such as social embarrassment loomed as in any way important to me right at that moment. But extraordinarily they did! As I walked and mused randomly I conjured up images and scenarios that I found distinctly unpalatable, such as the prospect of being identified on the Channel 7 News. I visualised a news item flashing up on the screen along the lines of “Lost bushwalker still not found in Blue Mountains, cold snap predicted for day seven of search”, things like that.

For years I had listened censoriously to reports on the nightly news about rescue trams searching for hopelessly ill prepared and equipped hikers lost in various national parks, and thought how totally inept and irresponsible were these tossers to put themselves in that position! Now the wheel had turned full circle and I reflected that could soon be my fate, nationally outed as the careless and grossly negligent doofus expending valuable resources on an avoidable rescue! Despite the reality of the imminent peril that I was facing, I had the weird presence of mind to push the central issue of my potential non-survival to the back of my mind and concentrate on the galling prospect of being the focus of widespread, social opprobrium. For some inexplicable reason, odd as it seems to me, this was more important at that moment than the very real threat to my life.

It occurred to me that I was hearing or sighting the helicopter above the gorge less frequently than the day before. It had crossed once in the morning relatively close to me, but despite my frantic attempts to attract its attention, in an instant it disappeared from view oblivious of my existence. A new potential news banner sprang into my head: “Emergency rescue services scale back search for missing Blue Mountains solo bushwalker, authorities indicate little chance …..”. My fertile mind turned to reactions of people to the news of my non-rescue, I wondered what people from work would say or whether for instance ex-girlfriends from 20-30 years ago would find out. I thought, they’d be sitting down in front of the nightly news with their families, see the story identifying me as being presumed dead and would say things like “Yes, I remember him! Well what do you know … he always did seem a bit impetuous!” My over-active mind was really giving it a nudge, as they say!

I don’t have a clue why this particular notion came into my head, but such were the bizarre thoughts I was entertaining after three days of exclusively sharing my own company. I can only surmise that maybe I was becoming a bit delirious. I started to speculate in a very left field fashion … rethinking the helicopter situation I reverted fleetingly to a view that they may still be looking for me. I wondered to myself: OK if they were scanning the whole Glenbrook Creek area, surely, I reasoned, they’d realise that I would come down to the creek at regular intervals? Therefore, I thought, why don’t they randomly drop 50 water bottles say all the way along the creek? They could even attach notes to the bottles saying they’re still searching for me! At least, if nothing else, that would solve the acute problem I had of no drinking water. Clearly, my mind was meandering in a wildly erratic way.

An hour or two later (I was watch-less as well so I couldn’t be sure of the time lapse) I started to recognise some of the landform features on the side of the creek (experience was to teach me that this was not a fail-safe approach as many natural features I thought distinctive, I later discovered were replicated elsewhere in the largely homogenous Glenbrook Creek bushscape). I moved closer to the line of trees on the highway side, passing a patch of massive wild, radiantly bright orange mushrooms, I noted a broad area of lanky reeds adjoining a long sandbank which reduced the stream to a trickle, this landform seemed faintly familiar.

Shortly, I spotted an opening in the bush, an area cleared of trees with an elevated mound, and I thought I could actually see the walking track on the ridge on the horizon. This seemed like the point I had gone off-track two days before, but what I couldn’t spot, which would clinch it for me, was the definitive marker, the old corroded white ladder. For this reason I decided to venture on for a bit to locate other markers which would corroborate the location. Unfortunately, the particular markers I had in mind (a log connecting the creek to the bank, a second sandbar with long, dense grasses, a darkly-discoloured rock formation), never came into view. So, I continued on, thinking that I had misjudged the distance between the various markers and the old ladder on day one.

Trudging on in silence up the creek I was reflecting on what had just transpired. Did I misread where I was, did I miss that one elusive window of opportunity for escape? The further I went in the opposite direction I became convinced that the answer was yes … or at least, probably. I was feeling extremely frustrated now. I reached another, vaguely familiar, landmark, which I couldn’t decide whether I had seen it on the first day or not turn back. Indecisive, I tossed up over what to do, concluding that I was now too far west I decided to turn around. Amazingly on the way back, despite looking intently, I couldn’t spot the clearing which I had located as being close to the old ladder. My sense of frustration heightened, I opted to abandon the ladder marker and push on eastwards. Yet again, throwing the dice, I resumed my quest to find those swimming holes, on which I had refocused all of my hopes for self-preservation.

Surely, if I could just locate those accursed pools, it would yield up a way out of the maze. I was annoyed with myself because I was heading east for the third occasion in three days, and for not finding the exit after all this time! I had now gone so long (and so far) without seeing any people, the valley appeared deserted and eerily quiet, bereft of all human existence. Contradicting this thought though was the plentiful evidence of human visitation, numerous bits of litter in the form of discarded soft drink bottles, ice cream and chocolate wrappers. So, the humans have been here, but not just any at the same time as me!

The slow upstream progress allowed me to muse on my mishap, my closely-run ‘escape’ of the night before. Falling from the rock-face was very scary and the outcome had been undoubtedly a very painful one but more worrying was the possibility of something being more serious amiss with me. But the unlimited amount of time I had to my disposal allowed me to mull over just how much more catastrophic the fall might have been. Out there alone in the bush without help, I could easily have pierced a lung or other organ on a rock, or fallen to my death by landing on my head, or by missing the narrow ledge and plunging to the bottom of the canyon – lots of possibilities for achieving mortality. I marvelled at my utter foolhardiness, what was I thinking!!! It was surely crazy, I thought, to have played that desperate card on the mountain, I must have been at that instant gripped by some overpowering instinctive urge to resolve my predicament right then. I guess that I had been in a sort of “crash through or crash” mindset.

The afternoon was hot, by submerging myself in the creek regularly as I travelled up it I managed to get some relief from the sun, refreshing me momentarily but sufficiently to carry on. Eventually I came to a large pool of water, not particularly clear in appearance but deep in parts. This pool was connected by a narrow isthmus of land and rocks to a second pool similar in nature to the first. I realised that this, finally, had to be the elusive, old swimming holes charted on the guidebook map. I looked around the pools and could see that there was a rough-hewn path coming down from the surrounding east-side hill, with a rotted-out old log forming an entry point into the water. This was, finally, the swimming holes, but from the state of them it was clear that they hadn’t been used for a very long time. I scouted round and discovered two potential paths leading away from the waterholes. One was quite steep, going up round a large, rocky hill, and the other followed the elevated bank on the edge of the creek. I tried tracking these routes, but it proved fruitless, as both seemed to lead nowhere, ending either with the path vanishing or coming to a halt at an insurmountable barrier of massive boulders which couldn’t be circumvented. I double-backed to the creek, concluding that if this was an access route to and from the Florabella track, it had long fallen into disuse, another black mark against the guidebook’s accuracy.

Back down in the creek, it was around 3 o’clock and very hot still. My aspirations to escape via this route had been snuffed out, what was I to do now? Going on, further up the creek, was a ‘unknowable unknown’, my map (whatever good it was given it’s dubious performance so far) did not in any case chart the area beyond the swimming holes, so I didn’t have any inkling of where Glenbrook Creek ended. I only knew what I had learned empirically over the preceding two days, that it stretched west for a long way. Backtracking (once again) seemed the only viable course. Yet once more I found myself putting all my faith in finding the old ladder. It was feeling increasingly like ‘Groundhog Day’ without Bill Murray (or any other human company for that matter!) From this point on as I cursed and struggled up the creek, I took every opportunity to metaphorically ‘kick’ myself over the lapse in judgement in not acting earlier in the afternoon when I spotted what I guessed was the trail from the creek bank.

I had by now given up on the helicopter as being my saviour, it wasn’t going to happen. That prospect had become more and more remote as the sightings become less frequent and further away each time. Dehydration was becoming a serious matter of concern for me again. My lips were parched and only cosmetically relieved for a brief time whenever I would cup the unpleasant-smelling creek water in my hands and brush it against my mouth. Even with this, I was aware that if I had to shout for help in the event of the sudden, miraculous appearance of some human sentient being, it was extremely unlikely that I would be able to muster anything more than the most inaudible squeak from my feeble voice.

I found myself adopting a curious stratagem to try to counter the reality of having nothing to drink and its testing physiological (and psychological) effect on me. I kind of psyched myself into this obsessive craving for either Pepsi or Coca-Cola, the inexplicable thing about this is that Coke is a beverage that I’d hardly ever drink or like much (ginger beer is my non-alcoholic drink of choice!)

Nonetheless the idea of it acted as a spur to drive me forwards when fatigue was having a debilitating and demoralising effect on my mind. Revisiting my musings on the mountain of the previous night I visualised a “walk to freedom” (to put it somewhat over-grandly), a sequential process, one step at a time. First, I envisaged myself finally making it to the old ladder, I didn’t ever contemplate the mechanics of how I would get myself, weary and worn, from the ground to the ridge above and then up a straight vertical incline of soft unstable mud and loose dirt to the ladder with nothing much to grab on to. I just knew that once I got there, I would do it – somehow! Willpower I guess.

I imagined myself on the Florabella track to freedom…ragged, filthy, exhausted, half-shoeless and thus doing a mono-shoe shuffle, I would somehow hobble my way back to Ross Crescent Blaxland, and my car. The last step to liberty would take me to the nearest servo. Then, the act of raising the glass of Pepsi or Coca-Cola to my lips heralded that I had returned to civilisation and all its creature comforts! I would indulge myself with the thought of the unbridled pleasure of the coke as it silkily went down my throat. I still can’t fathom why I chose coke of all beverages, alcoholic and non-alcoholic, as the symbol of my resolve to make it out of the bush.

My feet were starting to ache, my left foot in particular was feeling the effects of wear and tear sans footwear, and the nail on my big right toe had turned black and had commenced the process of separating from the toe. I don’t know exactly when or how this additional injury happened, perhaps when I stubbed it one too many of the countless, unseen rocks in the creek, either that or very possibly, it was damaged in the cliff fall when I clipped one or the two ridges on my rapid, spiral descent. After the disappointments of the day, I rallied my spirits and refocusing on the “magical elixir” of Pepsi Cola, I set myself the objective of reaching the old ladder by nightfall. But I didn’t properly reckon on the toll three days of lumbering and stumbling through fierce bush without food or water would take.

By around 5pm, wet and bone-weary, I again switched from the creek bed to the rugged terrain of the bank. I struggled on manfully for as long as I could, going forward where I could, sideways more often than not, around, under, over, through, all the while collecting new abrasions and incisions on my unprotected legs. Later on I paused long enough to do a count of the cuts on my hands (not even bothering to start on my legs!), I stopped when I got to 68 on the top and palm of my left hand and 51 on my right hand. My arms and legs bore witness to the fact that I had come a distant second in taking on a hostile physical environment. And it was not getting any easier after three days, ominously quite to the contrary.

By about quarter past six I was fed up with walking on such a difficult course, and easily succumbed to the fatigue of my tribulations. I simply couldn’t go after further … I stopped and searched out a favourable strip of sand to recover my energies during the night. I flopped down and lay on the cool evening sand, drenched and listless, in need of urgent sleep but unable to sleep in these harsh al fresco surrounds. Exposed like this on the ground, my position felt vulnerable and helpless against any unknown and unseeable threats that may be out there, but I was too drained to do anything about it. I submissively curled up in the cold in an essentially futile attempt to keep warm, all the time listening intently for sounds that may signal some new menace, this hadn’t concerned me before but now, exposed in the open, it had come into my head.

Reflecting on the events of the day, I was all too cognisant of an emerging pattern after three days: on each of the three evenings, after a hard, all-day slog in the bush, I was forced to call a halt to my trek earlier than on the one preceding it! It was becoming clear that understandably the cumulative effects of total exhaustion and lack of nourishment were starting to catch up with me.

As I lay on the cold sand, capable of no more than simulating sleep for the duration of another agonisingly long night in the open, many thoughts rushed through my head. Disparate as some of these were, they all came back to a common theme, I was exhorting myself to stay resolved. Whatever I did the next day, which way I went, which choices I made, this time I had to make them count, I knew that my chances of saving myself or being saved as each day passed, were diminishing rapidly.

Day 2

During what felt like a never-ending night I had heard ripples in the water, sounds made by small marine life I assumed. When first light arrived (around 6am), I was surprised to discover how close to the water I had decamped for the night in pitch darkness. The spot on the sand where, overcome by fatigue, I had crashed was about a metre away from one of the “natural pools”. Looking around at my surrounds in daylight I soon realised that this was not the old swimming holes as I had imagined the night before, rather it was just a wider part of the creek. Disappointed, I slowly gathered myself together and splashed water on my face to clear my head, and tried to figure out the best route from here. As I had come this far —how far was that exactly?—I felt that my best bet was to continue the search for the swimming holes, which according to the (now seriously compromised) guidebook map connected via an access path with the elevated walking track from which I had unwisely strayed. Once here I felt escape from this bush maze would be within easy access.

The Creek – sedate from without but deceptively unstable from within.

By now the seriousness of my situation was starting to kick in. I was undeniably stuck in this deep, unknown ravine and needed to find a way out. The bush on both sides of the creek looked very daunting with no favourable prospects for progress evident wherever I glanced. I pushed on nonetheless down the creekside in my original direction, but the path through the bush was so difficult that I eventually abandoned the “make a path” route and decided to try my chances in the creek bed itself.

The creek presented a different but equally arduous challenge. The rate of headway I was making was even slower than on land. My movements were ever so tentative as the creek was precarious and deceptive … my feet and shins made this discovery with painful clarity. Each forward step I made was taken with a degree of trepidation. The large stones and boulders, covered by thick coatings of moss at the end of each section of water, proved an incredibly slippery obstacle.

I lost count of the number of times I slipped and landed heavily in the water. Sometimes the only way forward was to climb over the large boulders which acted as natural dams curtailing the flow of water into a trickle at different points in the creek. From there I would continued on the creek floor, treading ever so warily because of the unseen submerged logs and large rocks, which despite my ultra-cautious approach, I would still regularly manage to hit with my shins. I soon discovered that wading through the entire length of the creek was not a possibility, as regularly I would walk, crab-like, across a long, flat rock platform and suddenly without warning the platform would end and plunge me into a two metre watery hole. I would find myself submerged, backpack and all, under the water, and forced to swim strenuously for a good 30 or 40 metres until I could again stand up. As I am not a strong swimmer, the more I had to do this, the more it was taking out of me physically, and also pushing my anxiety levels up.

Struggling to negotiate this hazardous water course, I started to entertain a new thought: what are the chances of drowning in this perilous creek? They seemed to be increasing the further I went. My misadventure had already prompted me to contemplate the prospect of meeting my quietus in this bush entanglement, but I had thought the most likely danger was expiring from thirst or perhaps from hypothermia. The thought of death by accident or misadventure in this stark environment, maybe something sneaking up on you unexpectedly, was a new anxiety, one that would revisit me again later this very day.

Soon after venturing into the creek I noticed a helicopter circling round in the approximate vicinity of the valley. As I had seen absolutely no one else anywhere along Glenbrook Creek since descending into this off-track jungle, I reasonably concluded that the helicopter must be searching for me. This reassured me somewhat and seemed to confirm that some of my emergency calls the previous day had been received or at least traced. My flagging spirits were uplifted a little, someone was aware that I had gotten myself lost, someone it appeared was looking for me. This optimism was to prove, in the end, without foundation. Nonetheless, for the time being, it did give me hope. Later on in my escapade things things looked much grimmer, although I can honestly say that I never really gave up hope, not then or at any point.

After an hour-and-a-half to two hours in the creek, struggling alternately to walk, tread water and swim, and finding nothing, I came to the conclusion that the swimming holes were either non-existent or the guide map had got their location very wrong. I decided to backtrack in the direction of the old ladder (where I had unhappily first entered this unforgiving stretch of ‘wildness’). As the day wore on, I became increasingly dehydrated, the sludgy, copper-metallic looking water in the creek was unprepossessing to the palate as well as the eye, so I decided drinking from it was not something I wanted to risk … not just yet (although I acknowledged to myself that this was a decision I might be forced to re-evaluate as I became more desperate for water).

When I got tired of trudging through the creek I switched to the far side bank and hacked my way through as best I could. All the while I was trying to see across the creek through the foliage to identify one of several distinctive markers or features that I had committed to memory on my initial trip down the creek. I was searching for some clue which would tell me I was close to the point at which I had made my entry on Wednesday. The problem here was that the only way I could get through the dense jungle of trees and bushes was by following the line of least resistance. This meant sometimes moving away from the creek, higher up the hillside where the thicket and shrubbery was not so all-invasive. From this position it was very difficult to get a sighter of the obscured creek, let alone the far side of the bank. As a consequence, I completely missed spotting any of the markers that I was relying on as my lodestars. Thinking that these distinctive features were much further downstream than I had originally imagined, I continued on along the creek, until I was far past the point where the old ladder was.

Discouraged by my failure to spot the target, I decided to turn back and head east once again. It was late afternoon by now. During the day I had had several sightings of the copter and also a light plane that seemed to be in search mode. Most of the time though, the aircraft were a long way from where I was. Something else about them was causing consternation, their search method: they was making wide, sweeping passes across the creek from one peak to the other and then taking a line down the contours of the mountain ridges which took them away from the creek. Now, I don’t profess any expertise in the area of ‘best practice’ search and rescue, but surely, common sense would say that (if they were looking for me), then the bush on the flanks of the valley was so dense and thick that there was zero chance of spotting anyone in the midst of such a boscage of foliage. When I first heard the copter overhead, I had decided to stay in or on the creek for as long as possible whilst walking. I reasoned that the best chance (the only chance realistically) of the copter spotting me was if I put myself in as open as possible position, ie, either in the water itself or on a clear area like a sandbar alongside the creek! But for some reason that I couldn’t fathom, the copter never once, in all the time it was hunting for me, attempted to search down the line of the creek itself!

Pausing on a sandbank for several minutes, I mused on some of the other implications of being isolated in the bush for an extended period. One consideration which I found mildly concerning was that I did not have my blood pressure tablets with me in the wilderness. At this time it wasn’t worrying me to miss a few days (I had done this before without concern) but I knew that I couldn’t go without my BP medication indefinitely, especially if my stress levels rose which was likely.

I decided to move off the sandbar and make for the upper slope to try to find a more manageable pathway through the bush. I got only 15 metres or so up the hill when I heard the copter again, this time however it was hovering high up but directly above the creek line. I scrambled back down to the sandbar and began waving my hat and bright blue backpack in the air to attract the copter’s attention, even trying to hoarsely shout out (I knew they wouldn’t be able to hear me but desperate straits drives you to try even the lowest of percentage chances!). It was to no avail, straight away the copter turned away from me and made a line for further west. I was left wondering if only I had stayed on the sandbar two minutes longer, would it have made the difference in the copter spotting me? Who knows, but this is just the sort of negative and futile idea that you naggingly cling to when one of the very few thin shreds of opportunity you had has just slipped through your fingers. The realisation had hit me by this time that I was trapped – and my options for escaping this trap seemed to be diminishing rapidly.

Disheartened at losing what I thought was a real chance of escaping the dilemma, I decided (wisely or unwisely) a different stratagem was required … I chose one which reflected my desperation. I was now convinced that the helicopter wasn’t going to find me, in my more delusional moments I may have even felt that they were not even trying to find me! I concluded that I had to find my own way out and couldn’t rely on external factors to do it. And I had to do it now! All I knew was that I did not want to spend another freezing night in the national park. The approach I decided on was a very direct one, I would charge up the nearest gradient on the northern side of the creek, which I knew was the direction of the walking track leading back to Blaxland, back to civilisation. With scant regard for myself, I set off. I didn’t care anymore about the likelihood of further damage the briar, bramble and other thorny bushes might do to my already tortured legs (my left leg with its ragged criss-cross pattern of scratches was already beginning to resemble the handiwork of a clumsy, blind tattooist!). Perhaps I was gripped by one of those atavistic urges that people find it trendy to reference these days, but, whatever, I was just intent at that moment on throwing myself wholeheartedly if recklessly into the tree-laden hillside. I was determined to reach the top and get free of the bush by nightfall!

Vertical rock-face followed by more vertical rock-faces.

After taking a circuitous route up the hill, I soon reached my first formidable barrier, a range of massive, stone-faced rocks. Everywhere I looked along the rocky range I could see only sharp vertical inclines, no easy, gradual ascent to the top revealed itself. After much deliberation, I decided on the route that seemed least hazardous. Somehow, going slowly, up and sideways, I managed to scramble to the top of these massifs, only to be confronted immediately with a next, higher level of stony cliff-faces! I scouted round the parameter of the base and eventually found an easier, lateral pathway up to a sort of ‘mezzanine’ level of rocks, which shortened the vertical portion of this climb.

I scrambled up the tree-lined hill with a determination now verging on desperation to reach my goal by nightfall. A third, sheer vertical incline of massive rock formations loomed into view. I contemplated my options for several minutes and again elected for the zig-zag approach to the top, up, sideways and up again. This time, the linear vertical incline portion of the cliff was longer than the previous ones, some 50 to 55 feet in length. I studied the rock-face, noting that the horizontal crevice lines in the rock were not at all pronounced, barely deep or wide enough to take the toe of a boot.

I psyched myself up to take on what I knew would be a Herculean task for a novice climber (let alone someone like me without any climbing experience whatsoever and without any equipment at all!). I slowly but determinedly started the ascent, miraculously I got about three-quarters of the way up, I won’t say I did it easily because that would give the wrong impression, but it seemed to be going OK. Steadying myself to take another step and grab, which would take me almost to the top, I noticed that the heel of my left foot was starting to come out of my boot. As I was precariously balanced on the vertical rock, I wasn’t game to reach down and try to nudge it back into the boot, I was fairly certain if I did, I would lose my balance, with predictable and dire consequences. I didn’t feel that I had any real choice about my next move, I knew I couldn’t hover there indefinitely and I wasn’t confident about reversing back down, so after a moment’s hesitation and deliberation, I took the next step up … one small step etc, but a disastrous one for this man! My left foot, half-in, half-out of the boot, couldn’t support itself in the narrow crevice, and with the boot working its way off, the leg gave way and I plummeted down. I was powerless to stop my descent, gravity and the rocky ground below controlled what would happen next.

If you are ever unlucky enough to find yourself in freefall like this, there really isn’t time to think about anything … it’s all happening so fast! If anything registers at all, it’s perhaps a kind of sense of unreality (like this can’t be actually happening to me!), and a feeling of anticipation, a dread of something bad. Then there’s a very sudden thud of body (your body!) connecting with solid ground. You are no longer moving rapidly, you’ve gone from 30km to 0 instantly, you have completely stopped dead, and you are left with a numbing sense of shock about what just happened. Well, that was my experience anyhow.

Although it all happened in a blink, when I had time later to reflect on it I could distinguish three separate stages in the trajectory of my fall: first, I immediately clipped the upper ridge of the cliff-face with my feet, then there was a second, much more solid contact (also with my feet) with a lower ridge on the rock-face, and finally, after involuntarily twisting my body around 180 degrees to be facing away from the cliff-face, I landed neatly on a flat stone step on my rump on the narrow path ledge below the rock-cliff. Because of the velocity that I was travelling at, I bounced off the step and was flung sideways on the path. Had I have bounced forwards rather than a lateral direction, I probably would have followed my detached boot which plunged down the hillside thirty metres or so to the floor of the ravine. The impact of my collision with the stone (cushioned a little by leaf litter ground cover) was taken squarely on my tailbone, but I instantly felt a very sharp shooting pain in my right side lower back – identified later by X-ray as around the L2 region (coccyx).

I lay prone on the ground face-down for a couple of minutes in a state of shock, quite incredulous at what had happened. I checked myself, the pain at least was an indicator that I was not paralysed, and I was able to move. After gathering my wits and instinctively trying to come to terms with the enormity of what had occurred, I slowly got to my feet. I stared ruefully up at the vertical cliff-face, cogitating on the folly of what I had attempted. I did a bit of a mental calculation as to the likely distance I had fell. I wanted reassurance that the fall wasn’t as bad as I first thought. I considered the linear distance, I thought 30 feet, Ummm? I measured it again with my eyes. No, not 30 I muttered to myself, I had been too conservative in my estimate, no, it was probably more like 40, yes 40 feet! A chill went down my spine as I thought, God! 40 fucking feet!

As sobering a thought as this was, I didn’t really want to dwell on the disturbing implications of this realisation at that moment, and so I pushed any thoughts I had of dread to the back of my mind. I knew that later on there would be time to replay the traumatic and painful incident in my head over and over. All I knew right now was that I had been lucky (lucky to be still alive) … but maybe also not lucky (if it turned out I had sustained possibly a serious spinal injury).

Despite what had just occurred I was immediately gripped by a manic urge, possibly a subconsciously self-destructive one, to get straight back up there, to reach that cliff-top somehow, to not let myself be beaten by it. My haste to immediately try again wasn’t entirely an irrational response, there was a sense of urgency to my action … I knew I didn’t have any time to waste, I needed to reach the summit before dark and the night curtain was already starting to engulf the sky.

I started back up the vertical face from the same point I had just fallen from. This time though, when halfway through my ascent, I spotted a side route up to the top which looked less daunting than my original straight-up route which I already had just demonstrated was fraught with peril. Despite still feeling somewhat shaken from the fall I contemplated the merits of this alternate route. It involved jumping from the top of the rock I was perched on to another, slightly higher rock just over one metre away. Though easier than the sheer cliff-face I had still set myself a risky task that was very ‘hairy’ indeed. One small miscalculation could have been calamitous, missing the rock or bouncing off it would certainly result in another, this time more dangerous fall and quite conceivably a fatal one.

Fortunately I managed to make the jump unscathed and from there clamber up to the rock-face. I now found myself at an intermediate point in the rock-face, to get to the level ground of the top I still had to traverse another huge boulder, which I ungracefully did by dragging myself backwards with great effort, up the boulder using a thin tree (close by, precariously perched on the edge of a high drop) as leverage. With my back wedged against the massive, round rock, I used my feet (one shoe on, one shoe off) to slowly winch myself up the tree bit by bit. With enormous relief, I found myself at the top, or at least I thought I was at the summit.

I struggled through the thick underbrush on the upper slope of the rock-face but by now the light had deteriorated making visibility on the mountain an extremely ‘iffy’ proposition. I scouted round for somewhere to ‘crash’ for the night. There were no good prospects but hastily decided on a dicey patch of unstable ground on a rocky ledge. This was a place to rest rather than actually sleep for a couple of reasons. The precariousness of my perch wasn’t conducive to sleep. It was too uncomfortably rocky and the ground sloped away at the edges. I was exhausted enough to sleep but for most of the night I was repeatedly harassed by a particular pair of persistent mosquitoes working, it seemed, in tag-team unison on a mission to irritate and annoy! Also, being high up on a mountain, lightly clad and still wet from the creek, I was just too cold to sleep … and to compound my predicament it started to rain lightly which persisted through the night. Notwithstanding all of this, I was feeling strangely optimistic, buoyed by the sense that, finally, apparently, I was tangibly within reach of escaping this overgrown bush prison.

Those of us with sedentary white collar office jobs are always being told by our GPs that we should get more exercise, it’s 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 in the bush over the following few days. 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!

On-track and seemingly on course.

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.