Gara spring walk

Last weekend we went to Gara Gorge in the Oxley Wild Rivers NP for a Saturday morning bushwalk. It was a beautiful spring morning, sunny and warm with a variety of spring flowers, birds, wallabies, and roos to be sighted along the way.

Shy wallaby

The littlest bird with the sweetest song.

 

Even though it has been dry there were plenty of spring flowers. The wattles have been blooming for the past month or so (with earlier varieties that started in July being done and some of the later blooming varieties just coming into their peak right now) along with many other types of native wildflowers. Most surprising on this walk was all the native indigo we encountered along the path. We planted seeds last year and the seedlings are just getting big enough that we could recognize the full-sized plants. The small purple pea flowers were just starting to bloom. It was really lovely to see.

Native indigo

Wattles

 

The road to the park, through cattle fields.

Misty morning at Dangars Falls

Heading to Gostwyck

After getting 30mm of rain in the last few days of March we decided the following weekend to drive up to Dangars Falls. It's about a 40 minute drive from Uralla: out past Gostwyck, down narrow unsealed roads though wooded areas into open paddocks.

It was a foggy morning and driving through the fields felt very bleak--we did not see any other cars on the way there and only two or three on the way back. The sparse landscape has its own beauty: winding through fields with lone eucalyptus trees, but the bleakness of the landscape (especially this time of year), added with the fact we saw no other people felt a bit apocalyptic.

We didn't see any koalas of course but we did see lots and lots of sheep..

Sheep shed

Lone eucalypt

Sheep on the road.

First view of the falls

The falls themselves are at the edge of Oxley Wild Rivers National Park, which stretches over some of the gorges in this area (green in the map below.) The gorge at Dangars Falls is of course spectacular and the 120m tall falls are really beautiful when they're filled with rushing water. We came here for a bush walk in February 2015 but the waterfall was completely dry-- only a bit of green stagnant water at the bottom of the gorge and a trickle in the river bed.

(Map courtesy Google and NSW National Parks website)

February 2015. Not a drop of water..

The rushing water over the falls was really loud, even from a distance as the water tumbled into the gorge below. As always, photos don't really give the scale of the area. We walked around the edge of the gorge and followed the river to the edge where it falls into the gorge, and back around again to see it from the other side. We saw a pair of wallabies and a few small birds, but otherwise the area was quiet except for the sound of the water.

Looking out from the ridge of the gorge, the river far below

Wallabies!

The river rushing over the lichen-covered rocks

Standing above the falls

The river feeding the falls

There were a few sign posts and information boards at the falls concerning wildlife (a particular kind of wattle found here, that you might see eels that have been washed down the river)  but overall not a whole lot of information about the history of the area. There is very little information available on the internet as well,so now I wish I'd taken more photos of the sign boards to remind myself.

Dangars Falls

Beautiful rocks of the gorge

Kangaroos on our drive out of the park. Almost didn't see them..