If you’ve done anything in the Budawangs besides the few most popular tracks, you’ve punted. I’ve had my own punts, like the time we tried to circuit the ridges around Jindelara Creek, or the Sneddens Pass circuit. In fact, unless you happen to be lucky enough to be following in the wake of a big group or a trail clearing party, punting is more likely than success. A month or so ago, while bicycling and hiking on the east side of Clyde Gorge I had got a glimpse of Webbs Crown: a small flat topped eminence surrounded on all sides by sandstone cliffs lying between two watercourses deep in Clyde Gorge. Similar in character to Hamlet Crown in the Ettrema Wilderness or Russels Needle above the Nattai River but unlike those two locations, I could find no trip or route reports anywhere. In fact, the only reference I could find was my own question on a bushwalking forum about Webbs Crown.
With the aid of satellite imagery and the topographic map, I had identified what appeared to be a route down through the cliffs on the west side of Clyde Gorge in the vicinity of Webbs Crown. If this route worked, we would only (only!) have to ascend and descend 100 to 120 metres in about half a kilometre to reach the base of Webbs Crown. From the base of the crown, we would circle the feature looking for a route to the top. Getting to the top was not guaranteed as, on the topographic maps and the imagery, no breaks are seen but sometimes the only way to know if something is possible is to try.
Budawang bush-wacking is notorious and, at times unpredictable. I’ve certainly had occasions where it wasn’t too bad, but more commonly there are few things worse or slower. It is not uncommon to proceed at a pace of under 500 metres an hour. We were a bit faster than this, but not all that much faster. A distance of about 1.5 kilometres on the map took two hours. And that doesn’t mention the soul and body destroying work of the bush-whacking.
I had hoped that the heath that grows on the sandstone slabs and shallow soil along the plateau might be less thick than other Budawang locations, but that was not the case. Sure, there were some patches of merely hip high vegetation but there were other locations where we made no progress at all. None. At these times, we had to retrace our path and look for a different route. Most common was bush which we could walk through but which was interminably slow and heavy work with fallen trees and branches elevated mid thigh above the actual ground surface which meant each step had to have a metre height. Given I’m only 1.58 metres tall, this was brutish work.
The pass, when we found it, was not a pass. We scrambled arduously down some distance but without an abseil rope we would not be going any lower and, of course, abseiling down is ridiculous when you have to exit the same way. Around 1:00 pm, after much thrashing, we had a quick lunch before trying to salvage all that bush-wacking by walking along sandstone slabs and cliffs that line Clyde Gorge. Although the cliffs are contiguous on the map, the slabs at the top of the cliffs are not. They are cut with small gorges and even on the slabs, thick brush grows and fallen trees have to be surmounted. But, we did get a good look at the west side of Webbs Crown (no way up on the west, south and even the north that we could see) and, remarkable as it sounds, we found a cairn. One single cairn marking a pass down between cliffs that gave access to Clyde Gorge.
I would like to know the story behind that cairn as the only information I have been able to uncover of travel in upper Clyde Gorge (apart from a few trips into the site of Rixons Gold Mine – all done before the 2019/2020 fires) is a few posts on Instagram about a trip from Bhundoo Hill to Batemans Bay through Clyde Gorge. It took this party almost five days before they were able to put packrafts into the Clyde River and paddle rather than walk.
This trip was, of course, a pure punt. We gave up before even reaching Webbs Crown. Had we been made of tougher stuff, we might have at least have tried to get down to the Clyde River and possibly up to the base of the cliffs. Realistically, however, we just didn’t have time. The cycle and bush-whack to the cairned pass took five hours return. The remainder of the trip, even if we did manage to find a route to the top would likely consume another seven hours minimum. When the possibility of success is so low, it’s not hard to opt for the punt.
