01/01/2004 - report - photos - Surefire Canyon track notes - Twister Canyon track notes

Participants: Tom Brennan, Gill Fowler, Andy Wilkinson

After a longish 7km fire trail bash, we headed down the ridge into the creek, and pretty much straight away reached the start of the canyon. We started with an abseil and a couple of tricky climb downs, before reaching an abseil with a tricky start over logs. Not liking the sling that was there, we reslung it and dropped into a reasonably long and beautiful section of canyon. One more abseil and a climb down, and we reached the exit canyon coming in from the left.

Following the guidebook, we headed downstream looking for the cave mentioned. The next 300m of canyon was spectacular, and there's no way I'd miss it if I went back. After a quick snack at the cave, we returned to the exit canyon and headed upstream.

We filled our water bottles before the climb out, only to refill them again a little higher after finding a dead wallaby in the creek.

The climb out was a little tricky, with a swing across on a sling and a couple of tree climbs, all some 10-20m above the canyon floor. We used some kind of belay on most of these, and were soon de-wetsuiting at the top cliff line. We had all used wetsuits, but probably could have done without.

From there it was just a long scrub bash up the creek to the road, which took quite some time including a lunch break. Andy got quite a shock when he nearly tripped over a large snake lying across our path as he was leading. Luckily he did the scaring away. The road bash was even longer - maybe 8km from where we emerged. It took us almost two hours to get back to the car.

Andy and I decided that we wanted to get the road dirt off, so we drove to Galah Mountain car park at about 7pm and quickly whipped through Twister. That had been my first canyon, four years ago, and was a lot of fun to do again. I'll have to go back when I have a bit more time. After our refreshing dip we returned to Barcoo Swamp for dinner and bed.