Crabapple Kingdom - Whispering Gully, Barrington Tops National Park, NSW

14/4/19 5:41pm

I am writing this to you from the forest; sitting in the tent. The ground is lumpy but soft. The creek is just a few metres from the door and it is noisy over the rocks. It is day 2 of our walk. My lower back is aching, sitting hunched over my notebook. Caz is rustling around beside me searching out the lumps under his sleeping mat. He extracts a stick and then a rock. He flattens some dirt. He has filled one bad hollow with his spare socks. 

It has been a long day. I am tired and my eyes just want to close but it seems a ridiculous time to go to bed. It is dark outside. The rainforest trees are so thick, the valley we are in so deep and shaded, that the evening gloom set in at 3:30pm. The scrubwrens are still chattering outside. I envy their energy. I know the first thing you will ask me - was it a hard walk. I’d say no, but it also wasn’t easy. It certainly was not what we planned.

We got 5km from our planned start for this walk and there was a road closed sign. It had been driven over and broken. So, we persisted too. But the road was closed. The forest was reclaiming it. We backtracked to the sign, pulled over and spread the topo maps on the bonnet. It was a cool morning and the warm engine through the map felt comforting. Some trail bike riders came ranging along, saw the road closed sign, and turned around. They stopped. The lead guy had a huge fat belly. I couldn’t take my eyes off it. It drooped over the bike’s petrol tank like dough. 

He asked:  Are you lost? 

We said, in unison: No. 

We explained how we planned to walk into Whispering Gully from The Mountaineer Trail. The bloke on the other bike asked: Are you prospectors? In unison, we said: No. 

Whispering Gully has a history of gold mining but is also renowned for its pristine rainforest. That is where our interest lies.  And so, rightly or wrongly, we decided to stick to our original route but to walk it in reverse. It is always risky, opting to walk upstream against the flow, against the lay of a river. 

Firstly, we set off down the narrow, overgrown lead of Karuah River Road. Towards the bottom of this road the trail bikers came riding towards us again. Since they’d left us, an hour earlier, they had ridden 25km (up to Berrico Trig and back). We had done 2km. We had seen a fat, red-belly black snake basking by the road, we’d seen a Bassian thrush dart through the undergrowth, we’d stopped and peered into the depths of Whitehouse Creek, stopped and listened to a waterfall roaring below us and dreamed up a canonying trip there.

Anyway, they left us and we walked on. We reached the Karuah River, took a quick break, then headed off the road and upstream. Just a half a dozen steps in and it felt like the forest closed behind us. We had stepped into an exotic garden. The ground was speckled with bright golden mushrooms each as big as the palm of my hand. Some crowded together in brilliant sunlit groups, others trailed off into leaf litter and scattered over an area just 2-3 square metres. 

15/4/19, 6:20am

So, was 6pm too early to go to bed? I tried to write more for you last night but...that is nearly a record for early bedtimes for us. By the time I took the lumps out from under my mat, folded all my clothes for a pillow, pulled out my sleeping bag, maybe it was 6:30pm.  As I lay down though, the darkness was intense. The creek sounded like a water fountain. Then I thought I heard sugar gliders squeaking; one talking and another replying. Listening more carefully the squeaks were at ground level. They had a different, more echoing, quality to them. It was definitely frogs calling. A strange simple call I had never heard before. I wanted to record it. I had a feeling it might be something special; that the frog was something rare. As soon as I turned a light on, they stopped. They did not restart, at least not for the 30 seconds I managed to stay awake waiting. 

Anyway, I have skipped so much since I wrote to you last night. And as I write, Caz is giving a suggestion as to what I should write. I am taking dictation. This is how it goes: “This is Chrissy coming to you live from Whispering Gully. It’s another big day for the crew out here today. The air is clear; feels like I am breathing it straight out of an oxygen bottle. I believe I am in the garden of Eden. There’s a pile of leaf litter up the back looks like its been dropped there by the local landscaping contractor. It’s just beautiful here. I got into camp last night so buggered I fell asleep like I’d been hit by Warner’s cricket bat.” And so it goes on. It is difficult to focus on writing what really happened. 

But yes, it is beautiful out here - the rainforest is lush and vibrantly green. There is a profuse amount of hanging moss festooning every tree. The rainforest spinach (Elatostema reticulatum) that lines the creek is ridiculously tall and thick. I have never seen any so tall. What is normally a low growing, knee-high succulent, here, in parts, it reaches my shoulders. The steep sides of the creek are covered in a carpet of different ferns - hard water fern, soft fern, maidenhair fern. Then there are side gullies thick with tall, gangly prickly tree ferns. There are large piles of leaf litter on nearly every creek-side flat and they are some of the oldest, largest brush turkey nests I have ever seen. We have passed many towering rainforest trees. Some of them have large buttress roots. These we think must be a type of Carabeen. Most noticeable are another tree of which there are many. They are large, round- and thick-trunked with grey bark mottled by lichen. Their trunks are straight and solid as a cannon. We think they are the most enormous crabapples we have ever seen. And tall. All the rainforest trees here tower far above us. 

26/4/19 6:24am

Hello again. I know, it is many days later. My note-writing ‘out there’ often finishes suddenly. I’m left trying to recount the finer detail, days later, sitting in a kitchen hearing the neighbour’s rooster crow, distant trucks on the main road, and pee-wees singing a duet on the telegraph wires. 

But, I still vividly remember several moments in Whispering Gully - I am standing in a small clearing. My pack is on the ground and Caz is using it as a tripod to photograph a spectacular forest of fungi that runs the length of a fallen tree. I am looking away from the creek and up the steepening hillside behind us. I am staring at a collection of rainforest trees - straight barrels, brilliant green leaves backlit by the mid-morning sun. One of the trees is a giant stinging tree with its dinner-plate size foliage, there are birds nets ferns cradled in the upper forks of each tree. A grey blue haze hangs in the air where the sun hits the warm breath of the exhaling trees. In the distance, a paradise rifle bird lets out a distinctive hawkish screek. The smell of a rainforest is divine - sweet and yet earthy. The air is cool and yet humid. Caz tries a few different angles for his photo, then, finally, I lift my pack out of the dirt, dust it off, check it for leeches, heave it onto my knee and then throw it on my back. We pick up our walking sticks (mine is from the base of the one of the many enormous Sydney Blue Gums we have seen). 

On the last day we walked from our campsite straight up a ridge towards The Mountaineer. There was a 500m elevation gain over about 2km. You can’t cheat that. There was the occasional shower of rain. We passed more big trees - messmate this time. Then, higher, Antarctic Beech. It took about two and half hours before we hit the Mountaineer Trail. Then about 6km back along the closed road to the car. There was a note sitting under the car windscreen. I had full intentions about writing, at length, to discuss that frustration - parents getting yet another phone call from the police. That is 4 times people have phoned the police because they see our car parked in remote locations. From the note, we can tell the car had been parked for just a couple of hours when the alarm was raised. There is no doubt people are well-intentioned. The person who left the note has left a phone number and later that evening I call it and have a long, delightful chat to a local who has explored the upper reaches of Whispering Gully. He tells me about the gold mining history of Whispering Gully. Did I mention there was a waterfall just above where we camped on our last night. I know I have forgotten to tell you about the gold diggings we saw as we walked up the gully - long trenches about 50cm wide and maybe 1 metre deep with square excavated areas to one side; the channels obviously for diverting the flow of the gully and acting as sluicing runs. We found a horseshoe. Some old bits of tin. Some more modern artefacts. But above the falls is, apparently, where the majority of the mining took place. Our friendly dobber tells me there is old machinery up there and extensive earthworks. I didn’t tell you how, on the last morning, I half-heartedly dug my hands into the mud and silt of the creek bed and let it wash away hoping to find a gold nugget left nestled in my fingers.

  

28/4/19 6:26am

I have done lots of things around the wrong way on this walk. We walked our planned loop in the wrong direction and I have researched the trip in the wrong direction - afterwards instead of before. Yesterday I read the entry on Whispering Gully in our little Hunter Valley bushwalking bible by Greg Powell and probably I would have walked this whole area differently. It makes me want to go back. 

I have researched the gold mining and found some interesting stuff: "Where the Karuah River rises on a spur of the Barrington Tops, a long brush-tangled valley guides it for 15 miles along gorges and through crevices on the first stage of its tumbling way to the sea. When the wind blows at night through the trees the whole valley rustles eerily. It is always full of hushed sound and echoes murmuring above the incessant noise of the falling river."

I found the frog too - Litoria barringtonensis. You can hear it on the Australian Museum's Frog ID app. And we confirmed the trees were definitely crabapples (Schizomeria ovata). 

Anyway, enough writing. That's the trip in a nutshell. Hope you enjoy the pics as well. I'll write again after our next adventure. 

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