Heart Attack Canyon

Of the well known canyons on the west side of Rocky Creek, Heart Attack was the only one I hadn't visited, so I had planned to get there sometime in the week. We set off shortly after 9am, and it was a long walk out along fire trails. Once we left the fire trail, between navigating and negotiating some banksia scrub, it was pretty slow going to the bottom of the gully with a 40m abseil off slings on a gum tree down to Heart Attack Brook. The abseil also took a while, and even with 60m ropes, the pull down was a lot of work. By the time we got to the start of the canyon it was getting on towards 1pm, and I called a halt for lunch. We rigged up the big drop in the mean time and as people finished lunch they abseiled into the canyon.

The first abseil was excellent, into a large cavern. Liz had a canyon snake almost drop on her from somewhere above. It was pretty slow to crawl away afterwards. The canyon opened out and I was half expecting another Thunderstorm, from some people's comments. However, the creek dropped into some tighter twisting canyon sections and continued for quite some way, with a number of tricky climb downs. There was a final short tricky abseil before it finally opened out for good into a pleasant creek.

Duanne found an interesting spring that feed from a crack in the rock into the creek, and filled his water from it. After making our way downstream, we found the exit gully pretty easily. It was a fairly long but steady climb up to the tops, marred only by stand after stand of large leafed smelly plants that reminded us of triffids. We didn't know whether they were natives or not, although they seemed to have very lush growth for natives.

Once back at the top we had a bit of a ridge bash back to the fire trail, and a long walk from there back to the car. Most of us struggled to see in the New Year, but it was a good day in the canyon