Sunday 9^th February – Flooding at Cedar Creek

Morning

Bronwen and I drove to Bronwen’s parents’ place, where we had a delicious cooked tomato breakfast.

Cedar Creek Falls

The Bureau of Meteorology (Australia’s department of not predicting the weather) said yesterday was going to be horrible and rainy, so we stayed home all day, even though it was quite nice weather. So today, even though it kept looking like it would rain, seeing as it wasn’t actually raining, Bronwen and I decided to drive out to Cedar Creek Falls (the northern one, near poorly-named Mt Glorious). Given the fairly obvious threat of terrible weather, we weren’t expecting many other people to be there, but as usual, it was far busier than expected—we managed to get a car park, but it was otherwise totally full.

After some discussion during which Bronwen assured me that by cleverly putting him inside a towel inside a plastic shopping bag we had he’d be totally waterproof, we decided to take Wallace (the drone) with us and walk up the creek to the waterfall, on the off-chance it wasn’t full of people, and looked interesting from above. However, almost immediately after we left it began to rain. At first it was just normal rain, but it soon turned into the kind of rain that let Noah know it was time to get in his ark, and we quickly realised that Wallace’s plastic shopping bag was not going to cut it. We tried hiding under some trees for a while assuming that the worst would pass—but it didn’t, so Bronwen decided to rush back to the car to get an umbrella while I waited under a tree trying to shelter Wallace from the torrential downpour.

Unfortunately, we’d gone quite a way before the rain got super heavy, and the creek had risen quite a lot while we waited for it to stop, so it took Bronwen quite a long time to get to the car and back with an umbrella. As I waited for her everyone who had been further up the creek came past, telling me how it was nearly impassable now. Just before I decided to sacrifice Wallace to the rain gods and battle my way to safety before it became impossible to go anywhere and I became drowned, Bronwen arrived with the umbrella.

We eventually made our way back to the car, but little rivers and waterfalls had sprung out of nowhere on the sides of the creek, making it quite hard to get past, and areas where the path normally crossed over rocks along the side of the creek were now deep underwater, forcing us to clamber through malicious prickles and vengeful plants. By the time we got back to the car it had stopped raining and was nice and sunny. Surprisingly, Wallace was fine—the towel was quite damp in spots, but it hadn’t got all the way through to him.

We waited for a while, but as it remained nice and sunny without any sudden flash floods or otherwise unexpected disasters, we decided to walk back up the creek, and try to get all the way to the waterfall this time. This time, we left Wallace behind. The walk up the creek was quite difficult in spots, having to detour through thick prickles and evil plants, and I nearly fell to my death at one point when I was climbing up a steep part and my hand slipped from a crack, and I hurt my toe banging it against the rocks and dirt as I tried to save myself. I only fell a few inches, but it was very scary and my toe was very unhappy.

Shortly after we finally managed to get to the waterfall it began to rain again, so we left—but this time we went back down the path, which goes up to the road, bypasses the creek entirely, and doesn’t involve nearly drowning or having to climb anything.