Rachel Grindlay

With the road into the Wolgan Valley closed indefinitely I was keen to find out what was achievable from Glen Davis. One thing I hadn’t realised prior to this walk was that Glen Davis is 200m lower than Newnes! This means a 500m ascent on the Pipeline Track to the divide instead of 300m – admittedly at a much easier gradient.

We headed off from the saddle onto the ridge and found a lovely morning tea spot with great views. We had great weather for the weekend with no wind which was a welcome change to the previous Sunday.

Everything was going according to plan until we got to the upper reaches of Petries Gully. The LIDAR map wasn’t showing us the full picture – it looked like the laser beams didn’t find the ground so some significant drops into the creek weren’t on our map. Additionally there were some significant drops in Petries Gully itself so even when I did manage to scramble in upstream I wasn’t able to continue downstream. We ended up using the handline to get in below what we hoped were the last of the major drops in the creek.

On any other trip I would have been excited when we hit a section of canyon. But in mid-August with no technical gear it was time to find a way out and around. The LIDAR suggested we’d struggle to find a way back into the creek so we went up instead.

We were fortunate to find a scrambly route to take us to below the upper cliffline and we were able to follow that around into the tributary of Petries Gully that we’d been aiming for.

Not walking in Petries Gully meant we didn’t have the chance to fill up water but fortunately we were able to find some in the upper tributaries. Loaded up with water for the night we headed up onto the ridge. I was well aware of the daylight hours left (~2.5 hours) and the distance we had to cover (~2.5km) and I gambled we’d make it to our intended campsite right on dark. However the going was pretty slow along the ridge in the re-growth and we found ourselves still on the tops as the sun set.

About half way down we needed to stop and get the torches out. It felt just like a rogaine, and our next control was the camp cave! Was the ‘control’ accurately marked on my map!? We navigated our way through the maze of parallel pagoda gullies to eventually be down and with ‘only’ a couple of hundred metres to go down the creek. Half an hour later we were all very relieved when Tom yelled out that he was at the cliffline and had located the cave.

The next morning the going was slightly easier in the daylight heading back up the creek. It didn’t seem to take too long before we were descending our exit canyon down to Little Capertee Creek. We made short work of a couple of drops with pack passing teams.

I was pretty happy, and I daresay not the only one, when we hit Little Capertee Creek and some easy walking down the fire trail.

We’d been discussing how the fire trail was looking unused and soon discovered why, when we hit a big washout on the road.

It was eerie waking through the Newnes campground with not a soul in sight. The campground has been closed for 3 months, and recently updated to remain closed until end of August – presumably because the toilet blocks are being upgraded.

I was bemused to find a sign advising the Pipeline Track was closed as we left the camping area. There had been nothing about that on the NPWS website when I’d checked just before the start of the trip. Hoping that this was a very old sign rather than a very new (that day) sign we continued on.

We enjoyed lunch and the views at the Pagoda Lookout before retracing our steps down the other side of the Pipeline Track back to Glen Davis.

We got back to the cars at the very civilised time of 4pm, almost erasing the memories of the late finish from the day before!? A weekend with some elements of type 2 fun, and a little bit of epic. I probably can’t say a great time was had by all, all of the time, but hopefully a great time was had by all, some of the time!