Davies Canyon is located deep in the Kanangra Boyd National Park a few hours west of Sydney. Hard to access, hard to do, and exceedingly hard to walk out of it isn’t a canyon to be undertaken lightly. It is easily the hardest canyon any of us had ever done.
Setting out at 7am Dom, Josh and I walked out along the Thurat Tops Plateau and followed the ridge out to the turn off described in the OzUltimate guide. Walking along the ridges was fairly easy but as soon as we started our descent into Sally Camp Creek the steep shale slope made going hard, and the chance of falling and damaging an ankle feel ever present. As it had rain a lot in the past week we knew the water levels were going to be fairly high, but hearing the river from a few hundred meters above the valley floor gave us some reason to be concerned.
As it turned out the water level was only an inch or two above the normal water line (based on moss and Creek algae guesses) and we decided to head on down through the canyon. The canyon is hard, I might have mentioned that already but was we passed through we encountered the most exposed canyon abseil I’ve ever done suspended from a narrow arete to the side of a massive waterfall and another shorter abseil were the anchor sling was set inside a small torrent of water!
Abseil 1. Photo by Dom
Josh heading down the canyon. Photo by Dom
Me regaining my nerves at the bottom of one abseil or another. There were heaps and they were big! Image by Dom
Just a small boulder… Image by Dom
Another waterfall. Seriously big… Did I mention that? Image by Dom
Eventually by about 7pm we’d made it through the canyon to our campsite at the junction with Whalania Creek. Happy to admit that this canyon almost got the better of me with the size and exposure of the six 50m abseils well and truly pushing my boundaries so a massive thank you to Dom and Josh for getting me through the canyon safely. I wasn’t much help!
On another note the walk out is also pretty heinous as it climbs more than 800m in 1.5km. On our walk out we covered almost 7km to get up the hill and then another 10km walk back to the road. It was a big day again.
Categories: Australia, New South Wales
Tags: Adventure, blue mountains, bushwalking, camping, Canyoning, Canyons, National Parks, nature, outdoors, photography, photos
The Graceful Cyclists 
Fun! Any corrections for my track notes?
Hi Tom, it was definitely fun. The rusty bolts are very skethcy now but there is a sling to the left looking down under the lip of the rocks. There was water flowing over the sling with the higher water level. We also got a little confused as there seemed to be one very very small canyon section (fun and got us excited we’d found the end) then we found the longer one to which your notes referred too and it was definitely impassable at that water level.