Dramatis persona*

helenhead Helen Chick

I've always wanted a bumper sticker that said "I'm a female, LDS/Mormon, Scout leading, geocaching, piano-playing, bicycling, mathematics educator with a PhD in maths ... and I VOTE"!

I think this makes me a minority group of cardinality 1!

* Since there's only one of me and "personae" is plural (I think), I've gone with dramatis persona.
March 2024
S M T W T F S
« Jan    
 12
3456789
10111213141516
17181920212223
24252627282930
31  

Visitor counter

Visits since May 2016

Recent visitors

Not Creekton Falls

It is always a bit awkward to discover — after a good day in a beautiful place with some amusing bits along the way — that you hadn’t actually reached your intended destination.

100 metres short.

That’s all. 100 metres.

And it’s not as if I couldn’t have known, because I had been there before and have photographs. Admittedly it was 26 years ago, and I have a memory like a sieve with no mesh, and I probably haven’t looked at the photos since 1990 (and I was struggling to look at them tonight since I was too lazy to find a slide viewer and I’m now quite long-sighted). In my further defence, the track was less than obvious when we reached a fallen sign that pointed rather ambiguously and it is difficult, even in retrospect knowing we didn’t arrive, knowing quite where we were meant to go (well, apart from the rather obvious “further upstream”).

We did, however, find a waterfall; it’s just that it wasn’t Creekton Falls.

The day began easily enough. My niece and the sister who is not her mum arrived and we headed down beyond Dover and made our way to Duckhole Lake again. Here I tested the HDR setting on my camera (no, this is not the only reason I revisited Duckhole Lake less than 2 weeks after the last visit!), and seem to have managed a better “dynamic range” in photographing the reflections, getting a more balanced exposure of light and dark regions.

bIMG_3968

As usual the reflections were lovely, but, unlike last week, we weren’t treated to some birdlife.

One of my other reasons for visiting Duckhole Lake was to hide a geocache. There had been one there in the past, which I found quite a few years ago, but it has since been lost and “archived”, and Duckhole Lake is the sort of place that ought to have a cache. I hunted around for a good hiding place, and found a likely looking spot … only to discover that there was a cache already there! Moreover, it turned out to have been hidden only four days ago … by a long-time friend of mine who I only recently discovered has become an active cacher. It turns out that the cache hasn’t “appeared” publicly yet, and so I have achieved the rare feat of getting a “first to find” on a cache that doesn’t actually “exist” yet, without even having any coordinates or even an idea that it was there. There have been a couple of occasions where I have found caches I didn’t even know about, but this time I’d looked online to make sure there was nothing in the vicinity … so it was a very amusing surprise.

The main reason for visiting Duckhole Lake, however, was to keep going past it. What is an easy track to Duckhole Lake becomes a more uneven narrow track, with lots of tree falls, a short steep slippery section which has a rope to help you (attached to a very small myrtle tree of undetermined breaking strain at the top!), a patch of horizontal scrub to negotiate, and a log crossing once you reach Creekton Rivulet (my glasses were so steamed up in the humidity and the creek was low enough that I wussed out and crossed on the rocks; the photo below is actually from our return trip).

bIMG_4013

And then the track gets worse. It is very narrow and sometimes barely discernible, it sidles along and up steep banks, it is marked by random bits of tape that don’t always help or aren’t always obvious, there is cutting grass (Gahnia grandis) to get caught in which delivers stinging welts on arms and legs from its finely serrated long leaves, there are more fallen logs to climb over or crawl under, and then, just when you think you may be following a track that goes somewhere else, you come across two signs: one pointing back the way we’d come to Duckhole Lake and one to Creekton Falls.

This comes as a relief, except it isn’t entirely clear where the track goes from here, until you look down to the creek that the track has been paralleling and see something that could conceivably be a lovely waterfall, and thus must, of course, be the desired Creekton Falls, since (a) there is a sign, (b) there is a waterfall, and (c) there doesn’t seem to be a track anywhere else.

So you head down to the creek, glad to have made it, and start having lunch and setting up the camera to take lots of time exposures. The first was of a little cascade, which no one would think is a named waterfall.

bIMG_3974

However, I then turned my attention to the water plunging over the cliff behind me, and very carefully clambered down the face, glad that there wasn’t too much damp slipperiness. Here I took a few more time exposures of what was clearly a waterfall worthy of the name, and even a name of its very own. Surely it was Creekton Falls.

bIMG_3984

bIMG_3986

As you can see, it is clearly about 15m tall (I didn’t quite get right down to the bottom), and although I had a vague recollection that suggested I should have been expecting something quite a bit taller, it was very picturesque and I was content that we had reached our planned destination.

bIMG_3991

Our journey back was a little quicker, because we kind of knew where the path went, and it seemed to be easier to see going downhill than when we were going up. There were other lovely things to see along the way, including these pretty fungi bedecked with dew from the humidity (at least, I presume that’s what it is).

bIMG_4004

And, of course, you can never have too many photos of Prionotes cerinthoidesbIMG_4017

And back at Duckhole Lake we were privileged to get a long-distance photographically-challenging glimpse of a platypus.

bIMG_4019

It was only this evening — as I tried to upload my track-log to Open Street Maps in order to mark in the track and the falls, and then hunted through my records and slide collection to find when I had visited Creekton Falls (since I knew I had), and searched online to see if I could find some actual coordinates — that I realised that we hadn’t quite made it. Creekton Falls really are taller, and a bit more out in the open …

And only about 100m further on, as best I can work out.

Sigh.

Luckily I didn’t hide a cache at Not Creekton Falls (I had intended to, but decided against it at the last minute).

1 comment to Not Creekton Falls

Leave a Reply

 

 

 

You can use these HTML tags

<a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <cite> <code> <del datetime=""> <em> <i> <q cite=""> <s> <strike> <strong>