A Spring Day in Spring Creek

Since walking down the eastern fork of Spring Creek, I’d been thinking about the western fork and, after looking at some images on Google Earth and NSW Six Maps, I’d become convinced that the images I had seen online were from the western fork. Back I went along the same fire trail (FT) but a bit further, around 4 kilometres in total, to a spot where the FT crosses the western fork of Spring Creek on open rock slabs.

A hundred or so metres down stream from the road, easy walking on open slabs, I found a rope tied to a tree and curled neatly below. An obvious but dubious hand line which I did not use, scrambling down the slabs instead. After about 300 metres of easy walking I reached a confluence and followed this tributary upstream, again on easy rock slabs. I turned around about 40 metres from the FT where the creek got bushy.

Back on the main creek, I followed the granite slabs downstream finding the travel much easier than on the eastern tributary as the creek bed is wide and open in this section. At one point, I got to a dry waterfall formed by a basalt (I assume) dyke which required a scramble down to skiers left. A little further down, at an open area, the granite ran out and the creek became just a normal creek again, albeit with some very large stinging trees in the nearby bush. Interestingly, I was only about 250 metres from the point I had turned back on the last trip! Lots of flowering orchids along the creek edge.

Back at the FT, I paused for a drink of water before the hot FT walk out and noted that there was not one but two pythons on the slabs about 5 metres away. We did not bother each other. On the FT on the walk out I found the very fresh remains of a half eaten bandicoot. Certainly, this corpse was not there on my walk in. I have seen dingoes in this area before and have often heard their howls, so I presume at least one dingo was nearby in the bush as I walked past.