Kanangra
Getting there
On Friday evening, having a beer in front of the TV, Alex and I decided it was a weekend for adventuring. I'd had my eye on Kanangra for a while, and Alex reluctantly agreed it might be worth a trip.
The next day, at 7:00am, we loaded up Alex's car Rusty (named for its majestic orange color) and set off for the canyon. The park turned out to be much further away than anticipated, and, after a brief stop for snacks in Katoomba we didn't get to the carpark at Kanangra walls until just after 11:00am.
After a little more faffing, we finally started walking at 11:20am, and we'd pretty much resigned ourselves to walking out in the dark (OzCanyon suggests the canyon will take 8-12 hours).
The Approach
We started back down the road and found our turn off pretty quickly (it felt much shorter than the 600m mentioned in OzCanyon) and managed to find the line of cliffs North of Kittani Top without much difficulty. From here, we figured getting to the start of the canyon would be fairly cruisy (It wasn't).
On reaching the cliffs, we heard some shrill whistles. Intrigued, we fought through the bush to a gap in the in the trees, where we got our first glimpse of the canyon. Turns out there was a group already on the first abseil!
Excited by what looked to be an awesome abseil we started on again. We lost the track not too long after this but decided we'd keep pushing on till we reached the river, and enter it a bit higher than originally planned. A little bush bashing brought us to the stream. Unfortunately for us, there were a series of 5-7m waterfalls between us and the cliff edge.
I scouted up the bank on the true right of the river to see if we could avoid abseiling the bluffs, and with some sketchy scrambling, and some down-climbing managed to find a way through.
As it looked like we might be about to get wet, the wetsuits went on and we waded over to the cliff edge.
Entering
Before the first abseil there's a small waterfall, maybe 7 or 8 meters tall that goes down to a ledge on the edge of the main cliffs. It's meant to be possible to scramble around this but it was getting pretty late in the day (12:50pm!) and we didn't want to waste time finding a way down. We rigged up an abseil on around an old tree trunk and rapped down to the ledge. It was a bit of a search to find the abseil rings, and we did, we were quite surprised to find there was already a rope on them!
Weight was coming on and off the rope pretty regularly, so we decided to wait until whoever was on the other end of it was done before rapping down. Nearly an hour (and much antsing) later, we were still waiting and I decided to abseil down and try and find out what they were doing. Fortunately, about ten meters down, I found a set of rings and we decided to break the 50m abseil in two (and not have to worry about having two ropes in the rings). Alex quickly made his way down to me, and we decided he should carry on down to the main ledge.
About half way down, the other group came into sight. Turns out their rope was stuck, and they were having a debate on the ledge about what to do, as another member of their party prusikked back up from the next abseil. Luckily for them, I was still up at our top anchor, and Alex was able to yell up to me to pull their ropes down.
With much swearing and difficulty the rope came down, and it was with a bit of a sense of relief that we jumped in front of this group for the next abseil.
The rest of the canyon was pretty awe inspiring, but not too eventful.
