Ryde Falls

Saturday 18 January 2025 

At 9.15am seven of us—a mixture of old, new,  returning, and potential club members—set off  from Cranford Street, on a cloudy Saturday morning, under Mary’s able leadership. After walking twenty minutes we came across a prominent rocky outcrop, so declared this an ideal stop for morning tea. The track was a bit overgrown with blackberry and other foliage at the start, and along the way we encountered some gnarly tree roots, tree-falls to limbo under, some slippery paths and lots of boggy, muddy patches. We sustained a couple of wet bottoms from unscheduled slips and dips while crossing the largest stream, and a dust bath, but fortunately no injuries and no mud-baths. I knew Darcy had spare clothes in Mary’s car. Would I need them? Luckily, sandflies weren’t too troublesome, as most of us had not packed insect repellent. We eventually arrived at the falls around 1pm. Mary and Darcy had been to Ryde Falls before and proclaimed they had never seen them with so much water. Retracing our steps for five minutes to the “campsite”, we had a well-earned lunch. On our way back to Mountain Road car-park, at around 3pm, the clouds departed and blue sky and sun emerged. 

We walked the last hour back in brilliant sunshine and reached the cars, tired but happy, just a couple of  minutes after 4pm. Muddy boots were carefully pulled off. They would need a messy scrub-off job when we  arrived home. My phone app said we’d covered 14.6km, gained 500m in height, with a moving time of 4½ hr.  From the map, the overall height gain from Mountain Road to the falls is 150m.

We were: Mary McKeown,  Darcy Mawson, Laura Keenan, Helen Rutter, Joy Schroeder, Carol Cheong and Karen Fincham. KF