WARNING: this is an extremely difficult and dangerous walk on slippery rocks and boulders that will take from six to ten hours to complete. I do not recommend this walk to anybody but very experienced groups with appropriate safety equipment and skills. The potential for serious injury is very HIGH.

This was day one of a loop walk in the Blue Tier area starting at the Poimena camping area, Day 2 is here. We arrived Friday evening to drizzle and low cloud and jumped Into the tents after a quick setup and pleasant night sleep to persistent rain. We rose to a fine but cool start to Saturday around 6AM. While eating breakfast we strolled up to the summit of Mt Poimena and enjoyed the views to the East Coast and inland across all the peaks and features. The wind was quite cool up there. Time to get going due to the long day ahead of us and we headed off around 7AM.

The first section is on an old track passing over tunnels, air shafts and lots of old water races and mining history. We spent quite a bit of time exploring some of these features as our party leader had excellent knowledge of the area having grown up around here and extensively explored the area for years. We arrived at the old Wyniford River Weir around 9:15AM. It is amazing that this weir is made of timber but has stood up to all the huge floods in recent years and is still standing. This is the actual proper start of our walk along the river bed.

This walk could only be undertaken during sunny weather as the rocks would be like ice in wet conditions. The low river level also helps navigating through all the canyons and cliffs. The river is constantly descending all the way to the old Three Notch Road where we leave the river about 10km from here. One section of the river drops 100M in 100M over huge boulders and rocky cliffs and took some time to traverse. Several bits required walking through the scrub to navigate past impassable sections. A view out to the Croppies Point area was a real surprise on one drop off. Going is very slow picking your way through in some sections. There are some beautiful forest sections and some interesting scenery along the river with cascade after cascade. One very stubborn snake was also encountered who made us walk around him! We also found a huge almost perfectly round rock that the river had polished in one of those depressions you see. It was calculated to weight aprox. 40kg from its diameter and rock type.

Our group spent almost eight hours in the river before we emerged onto the old overgrown Three Notch Road. We all survived with only a couple of anxious moments with falls and slips. The first kilometer or so of the old road was pushing through scrubby saplings that have overgrown the track and plenty of fallen trees. This part of the road will cease to exist in the very near future especially given the bridge across the Wyniford to access it was washed away in the last floods. It was much faster walking than in the river though. We walked the forestry roads and re-crossed the Wyniford at the missing bridge before we reached our campsite around 17:45, very close to the old Tomcat mine behind Garibaldi Hill on the banks of the Wyniford River. We lost about 750M of elevation from our starting point this morning.

We setup camp next to the river and explored around the area with all the old mining activity every where around us. There was massive damage to the river in this area from the big floods recently. A small campfire / bush TV made the evening very pleasant and the smoke kept some of the mozzies away. We all slept pretty well ready for part two tomorrow along the old Three Notch pack horse track back to Poimena.