Date: 1-2 Feb 2025

Location: Kanangra-Boyd National Park

Author: Zen Marcos

Party: Alex Motyka, Nat Powell, Toby Horne, and me

 

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Sean has a theory that everyone is either a talker or a listener. Of course, talkers can listen and vice versa, but everyone is more comfortable doing one or the other.

Toby and I are both listeners. The weekend before, we were slogging it out from a canyon in Victoria along a lengthy, repetitive fire trail. Just him and I. After a long while, I broke the silence.

“I’m a little nervous about next weekend.”

“It would be weird if you weren’t,” he responds.

The silence swallowed us once again.

 

Day 1: Kanangra 1000

On the first of February 2025, at 4:40 am, my alarm rudely awoke me. That night had once again taught me that going to bed eight hours before your alarm does not equate to eight hours of solid sleep. I prepared as much as I could while staying half in my sleeping bag but was eventually forced out of my tent and into Nat’s car, on our way to Danae Brook.

Ok, context. Years ago, Leo Tregret had completed Danae Brook, Kanangra Main and Kalang Falls canyons in a single day. This became a challenge of some fame in the canyoning community, and Alex and Nat were the next people game to try it. Nat asked if I wanted to join the team, and I tentatively accepted. We recruited Toby too.

So, two months later sees us walking out on Mt. Thurat Fire Trail at 5:37 in the morning. It was still pitch black, but soon brightened up. The sun didn’t emerge though. It was blocked by a thick fog.

A blurry image of me on my way to Danae Brook – no time to stop for photos!

I finished wetsuiting up first (me? Ready the fastest? That’s a first), so I went to rig the first pitch. To save time, we decided to skip the carwash (a dark, wet tunnel) at the bottom of pitch two by staying on the platform above it. Toby went first and walked across the platform to find the anchor. He couldn’t, and concluded that it had been buried under a pile of debris. We had to go through the carwash after all. This plan change lost us some time.

Looking down the slot from the platform, with the debris in the foreground.

With that kafuffle solved, the rest of the canyon went smoothly. I could feel the efficiency in our teamwork, the saved seconds and minutes adding up – we were making good time. We decided to try rigging the 35m pitch with my 65m rope, hoping to avoid tying two ropes together. During Nat’s descent, I felt the rope suddenly spring upwards, followed shortly by a loud splash! This sent my eyebrows shooting up. But after hearing her two whistles, I figured she was fine.

“I dropped off the end of the rope intentionally,” she said when I joined her at the bottom. “I could see that it was a metre or so short but figured I’d be fine.” She also said that her attempt at landing on her feet had been unsuccessful. Landing bum-first into 15cm deep water didn’t sound like my idea of fun, but you do you I guess. The 65m rope did reach, by the way.

The climb out was slippery as shit. I led the first pitch, and I quickly dismissed any notions of climbing it properly – I pulled on any and all quickdraws I could. Nat clearly felt a similar sentiment while leading the second pitch.

And then we were hiking out, on track for sub 5.5 hours. “Wouldn’t it be funny if we got back to the carpark just as another group was leaving to do the canyon,” says Toby. Given our return time of 10:57 am (5hrs 20mins car-to-car), that possibility wouldn’t have been out of the question. Unfortunately, it didn’t seem like anyone else was doing Danae that day.

 

Some other photos from Danae Brook.

Next up was Kanangra Main. We drove to the Kanangra Walls Lookout carpark and walked back to the entry track. Fog update: it had not cleared. The plants and ground had had no chance to dry off. So much for having dry clothes for the walk ins and outs.

The wetness also meant that the Kanangra Main entry track had devolved into a channel of thick, slimy clay-mud. To avoid slipping over, I had to take very small steps and waddle like a penguin. Even so, every second step sent my foot slipping behind me, making me feel like I was involuntarily performing some interpretive dance. Eventually, we got to the start of the canyon. I couldn’t tell whether the ~150m Wall was more or less intimidating when we couldn’t see the bottom.

Alex at the top of the second pitch in Kanangra Main.

We smashed out The Wall’s abseils quite quickly. Alex had the good idea of rigging P6 from the first bolt of the optional traverse, so we could avoid the water during the abseil. Again the canyon went quite smoothly, apart from one complication with Alex’s 60m rope not reaching the bottom of the 58m P13 – strange. The creek walk at the end of the canyon was also slower than it could have been due to all the rocks being wet and particularly slimy.

About a quarter of the way up Manslaughter Ridge, I started to realise that this was going to be a long day. At the end of Danae, I had still been full of energy. But Manslaughter Ridge is a killer at the best of times (pun intended), let alone when you’re trying to catch up to three of the fittest people you know. And this was only the first of two Manslaughter Ridge ascents that day. We got back to the top in 5 hours and 11 minutes.

 

Some more photos from Kanangra Main.

We restocked our food from a drop Nat had left the night before and headed straight into Kalang. The rocks in this canyon were the slipperiest of all. In fact, we later talked with another group who had bailed from Kalang explicitly because it was too slippery. Nevertheless, Kalang also went smoothly. Even Manslaughter Ridge felt easier the second time around. As if to tease us, the fog started clearing up just as we were reaching the top.

Me nearing the top of Manslaughter Ridge with the skies finally clearing behind me.

And then we were back at the Lookout Walk tourist track, just 3 hours and 47 minutes after we left it. There was a strong stench of relief and victory in the air as we walked the last couple hundred metres to the cars. “Zen’s got chaffing,” Nat pointed out. It was true. I had that cowboy gait. Dry clothes were at the forefront of my mind. Thankfully, they were only a few short minutes away.

Some more of Kalang Falls.

In a grand total of 14 hours and 25 minutes, we were done. We were proud, of course, but we were left wondering how Leo had completed the challenge in just 11 hours and 45 minutes, especially because he had exited Danae via Thurat Spires…

Toby later calculated that we had done just over 1000 metres of abseiling that day, so we dubbed the challenge Kanangra 1000.

 

Day 2: Dione Dell and Margaret Falls

I had thought Nat was partially joking when, the night before, she said she would be sleeping in until 10 am. She was not. To be fair, I didn’t get up much earlier, and I could have done with the extra sleep. So, 10:50 am saw us walking into Dione Dell. Alex led us through an alternative entry that cut out a section of creek bashing.

I had never done Dione Dell before, and I found the canyon surprisingly pleasant. We stopped to de-wetsuit and have lunch at the end of the canyon, just above Margaret Falls. It was a big drop. 108 metres of sheer cliff, to be exact. And Alex wanted to replace the 10-year-old rope at the first hanging belay anchor with a chain. Despite Toby volunteering, I was somehow given the task. We developed a game plan.

I abseiled down first to the anchor 31m down, clipped in, and got off rope. It was pretty cool to be completely free-hanging off the side of a cliff 77m up. Alex then abseiled to a ledge just a few metres above me with the chain and some ridiculously large bolt cutters. He locked off there, where we could communicate. I measured the distance between the bolts and relayed this information to Alex, who then cut the chain to length. Despite having a ledge to stand on, cutting through 10mm of stainless steel clearly proved to be a difficult task, as I heard quite a bit of primal grunting. He then passed the shortened chain down to me. Fastening the chain to the bolts required some faffing at my end, as I realised I was clipped into the very bolts that the chain needed to be attached to. Not sure how I didn’t foresee that one. Finally, Alex skipped the newly chained anchor altogether and abseiled down to the next set of bolts, another 32m below. The 65m rope just reached. I followed, glad to get off my anchor. By that point, I had probably been hanging there for half an hour. Alex rigged the last pitch, and I abseiled the rest of the way down. Unfortunately, the pool at the bottom was unavoidable. Nat and Toby followed, and then we were done.

 

Left: The view from my hanging anchor.

Middle: Alex abseiling past me.

Right: Margaret Falls from the bottom. Spy the dots of Alex and Toby still halfway up.

The walkout was a nightmare. Steep, loose ridge with no track. All the plants were spiky vines too. At one particularly steep and loose section, we encountered a continuous wall of thorny raspberry bushes. There were no non-spiky plants to grab onto. As I climbed, I was picturing the ground slipping under my feet, causing me to tumble downhill through the thorns. We all made it through unscathed, however, and eventually got back to the Dione Dell exit track, which took us past The Grotto of Uranus and back to the cars. The whole trip took under 6 hours.

And we were done! I was buggered but had thoroughly enjoyed both days. We were all proud of our achievements. Though I would take some convincing to do the Kanangra 1000 again…