XDR4XDR4 CANBERRA BUSHWALKING CLUB NEWSLETTER it Canberra Bushwalking Club Inc. GPO Box 160 Canberra ACT 2601 Volume 54 Number 2 www.canberrabushwalkingclub.org March 2018 GENERAL MEETING 7.30pm Wednesday 21 March 2018 Weston Uniting Church 16 Parkinson Street, Weston The Kangaroo Island Wilderness Trail Guest Speaker: Meg McKone In March 2017, a group of eleven from the Canberra Bushwalking Club walked the 61 kilometre Wilderness Trail, camping at the four official campsites. Along the way we saw pounding seas, precipitous cliffs, prolific sea life, remarkable rock formations and a wide variety of heath and woodland vegetation, and had a taste of the wild weather that can blow in from the Antarctic. But is it truly wilderness? A storm approaching from the west across Maupertius Bay. Photo: Meg McKone Contents River Crossing Training Managing Cramps CBC Committee members Conservation – Warragamba Dam Family Walks Program and Rivers Contributions to the newsletter Editor – Focus on Rivers Hiking in Taiwan and Japan Activity Program Membership Hiking and Paddling the Upper Murray Bulletin Board Canberra Bushwalking Club it March 2018 page 1 River Safety On Sunday 18th February, 25 Club members became a little safer – they attended the Club’s river crossing training course. The site was the fast-flowing Cotter River, just below Corin Dam. The trainers – Lorraine Tomlins, Rowan Peck and myself – did not claim any special qualifications but we had experience in New Zealand, home of some fast and deadly rivers. We were also experienced in sudden and unexpected immersion, which turned out to be just as well … In the first section of the course, participants learnt how to recognize the signs that a river cannot be safely crossed: • Discoloured surging water • Trees and debris being carried along • Hazards downstream of the crossing point – if you are swept over a waterfall or against partly submerged logs, willows, fences or rocks, you may drown • Vibrations that indicate that underwater boulders are being rolled by the current • Standing waves Diagram of a standing wave • Unavoidable aerated water After walking along the river bank, the trainees picked two safer crossing points – a bar of small rocks that angled across the river, and a knee-deep section of calmer water at the downstream end of a pool. The second section of the course focused on solo crossing techniques. Twenty-five stout eucalyptus sticks magically appeared. The trainers demonstrated how to hold the stick in the recommended way – across the body, with the foot of the stick upstream and pressed into the river bed. Some commented that this was counter-intuitive – why not place the stick downstream, to support yourself against the push of the current? But a downstream stick can easily be swept off the river bed by the current, whereas the current actually helps hold an upstream stick in place. With sticks and shuffling steps, everyone Rowan teaching solo crossing techniques made it across and back comfortably. In the third section of the course, we practiced team-crossings using the method of grabbing your neighbour’s pack strap, as recommended by the New Zealand Mountain Safety Council. This was not a time to insist on personal space. With their arms around each other and pressed hip to hip, the participants found themselves very stable. Jenny Horsfield raised her hand – what would happen if someone in the team lost their footing? The three trainers, with a co-opted David Poland – decided to demonstrate. I took the upstream position, normally reserved for the strongest in the team, flung my feet downstream and added some unnecessary histrionics. Canberra Bushwalking Club it March 2018 page 2 River Safety The downstream three remained steady as a rock, while I ‘recovered’ my footing. It looked, for a while, like a perfect demonstration of the effectiveness of the team crossing method. Then, however, Rowan, on the downstream end, decided that it was all going a little too smoothly. Using his considerable strength, he added an unscheduled jerk and leap movement to the demonstration. The rest of us went down like nine- Linda and Rowan with team crossing students pins, suddenly wet to the shoulders. The participants gathered on the bank appreciated the scene enormously. As did Rowan. Laughter weakens the muscles so it took us a minute or two to recover. But I have to say that, when we did recover, we found that we were still clutching each other’s pack straps, and had lost only 20 centimetres or so in the downstream direction. It was a good lesson in dealing with the unexpected. We adjourned for zucchini slice, home-made Anzac biscuits, chocolate and raspberry cupcakes, home-dried strawberries and hot drinks. Time in cool water requires calorie replacement! In the final section of the course, Rowan demonstrated waterproofing a pack and various ways of swimming with a pack. The last time the Club ran river crossing training, all the trainees preferred to provide encouraging comments from the bank while the trainer entered the water alone. This time, most of the participants leapt in. They tried the following styles: • The kelpie – you strap your pack on your front; this gives you maximum buoyancy and makes you swim with your head out of the water like an excited puppy • The happy splasher – you wear your pack in the normal way, and float on your back, splashing with both hands to propel you backwards; this allows you to chat to other people making the crossing, which is just as well, since you need them to tell you whether you are going in the right direction • The serene stretch – you gently place your pack in the water, with the straps up, and push it forwards with one arm while you side-stroke; this requires calm water, and offers some hope that you will arrive on the far bank with the back and straps of your pack fairly dry. River crossing skills are not just useful for people undertaking remote and challenging walks. A storm while you are walking the tourist tracks of the Main Range, for instance, may cause a rapid rise at the Snowy River crossing just below Charlotte Pass. Now there are 25 Club members who will have more confidence in judging whether it is safe to cross, and more skills if they do cross. If you missed out on the course, you can see some of the course content on the River Crossings page on the Club web site. Linda Groom Walks Secretary Photos and diagrams supplied by Linda Canberra Bushwalking Club it March 2018 page 3 Dam Facts In May 2017, the NSW Government released Resilient Valley, Resilient Communities - the Hawkesbury- Nepean Valley Flood Risk Management Strategy (Flood Strategy), providing a framework to reduce and manage flood risk in the Hawkesbury-Nepean Valley. To achieve this, Warragamba Dam wall would be raised by 14 metres so that the Dam will hold the equivalent of 2 additional Sydney Harbours, causing 4,700 hectares of world heritage listed national parks and 1,800 hectares of declared wilderness areas to be forever scarred from sedimentation, erosion and invasion of exotic plants. 65km of pristine Blue Mountains wild rivers would be submerged under a raised dam and 48 of Australia’s threatened and endangered species would drown. Large areas of the Kanangra-Boyd and Nattai Wilderness Areas are under threat from the dam raising. Lower reaches of protected wild rivers including the Kowmung, Coxs, Nattai, Wollondilly and Little River would all be drowned underneath sediment-rich dam water, killing hundreds of native plants and animals living in world heritage valleys. Constructing flood levies, pre-releasing dam water before floods, and not building new housing developments on floodplains are alternative measures that could be implemented at far less cost, while not destroying parts of the most protected natural landscape in Australia. Map taken from Colong Foundation website You can join the campaign to protect Sydney’s water catchment by going to http://www.dontraisethedam.org.au/wilderness-impacts Cynthia Breheny Conservation Officer Kowmung River Canberra Bushwalking Club it March 2018 page 4 Rivers and Us You might notice that this month’s IT has a river focus. The ACT and surrounds have plentiful rivers and streams of all sizes and we meet them regularly on our bushwalks and negotiate them in a variety of ways. In this issue we present a few ways that people deal with rivers – whether walking and paddling down the largely unexplored and difficult first 150km of the iconic Murray, as Mike Bremers did, or sounding alarms about the impact on the rivers of the Blue Mountains if the proposed expansion of Warragamba Dam goes ahead. Linda Groom describes the invaluable river crossing training delivered to 25 Club members on the Cotter in February. And there is an article about children and Murrumbidgee River, Gigerline NR their explorations in the rivers and creeks around the Photo: Meredith Hatherly ACT during Club family walks. The IT continues to invite contributions. There is a great deal of activity in our Club and all your experiences on walks are of great interest to those who have been to those places, or who may one day go there, or who are simply interested in the observations and experiences of other walkers. Keep your trip reports rolling in, or for that matter, any other item which you think would be interesting for Club members to read. If you as a walks leader are planning to put a trip report on the Club website, the IT would welcome a summary of that report – a taster, perhaps to encourage people to read it on the website.