The Blue Mountains looking west.  My mountain bike ride took me along the cliff face on the right side of the picture.

This valley ends in a 150' waterfall.   The wind blew so hard that the water was blown UP the waterfall face and out of the valley as spray, never hitting the ground!

John McMahon in the Blue Mountains.   The waterfall mentioned above is immediately to his right.  The railing he's leaning against sits on the edge of a cliff no less than 500' tall.

Sunset in the Blue Mountains.  We stopped the car along the roadside to get this shot.  This photo doesn't begin to do justice to the actual scene.

Crystal Shower Falls in the Dorrigo Rainforest.  The path (part of the Wonga Walk) leads to the small cave behind the waterfall and then out the other side.  To get better pictures, I (of course) walked straight down into the stream, and just about killed myself on the wet mossy rocks.  It's every bit as steep as it looks.

A single branch in the Dorrigo Rainforest.   Tree branches grew horizontally, vertically up AND down, and generally twisted themselves into CrazyStraws.  Sometimes they grew out from a tree, twisted all around, and then dove straight into the ground.

Comments or questions to: Bike2Grin@AOL.com or BettwyK@MtnBrook.k12.al.us

The Australian Wilds

Of course, when you mention Australia, nearly everyone immediately pictures the Outback or the Great Barrier Reef.   What most people don't think about is that Australia is the size of the United States, and getting to the Great Barrier Reef from Sydney is like flying from Miami to New York - about a 3 hour plane ride - and the Outback is also hours from Sydney.  So, we didn't get to either the Great Barrier Reef or the Outback, but we did visit the amazing Blue Mountains and the Dorrigo Rain Forest.

The Blue Mountains get their name from a bluish haze in the air generated by Eucalyptus forests.  To picture the Blue Mountains, take the Grand Canyon and smash it down into the Smokey Mountains.  You get dense, endless mountains filled with deep valleys and steep cliff-sides.  A formidable natural barrier between the ocean and the outback, the Blue Mountains took over 100 years to even find a way through.  There are still areas so remote as to maybe never have been visited by humans, except from the air.  A popular new sport is Canyoning, where you rock climb or rappel down one end of a canyon wall, then float or paddle back to civilization along the river running through the valley.

For me, the Blue Mountains meant mountain biking and photography.   I rented a bike and took off for about 2 hours.  The ride snaked through the forest along "Glenlarson Road," a ridge that narrowed to less than 25' atop steep cliffs hundreds of feet high.  Basically a fire access road, there was only one section which got a bit dodgey.  The rest was smooth and fast.  The day started nice but a little chilly (about 45 F).  The first picture on this page is taken along the trail.   By the time I finished, it had dropped about 10 degrees and was windy and cloudy.  John and Kate must have noticed the change, because they brought me a hot sandwich and drink when they came to pick me up. 

On the way home, we saw possibly the most spectacularly colored sunset ever.  The reds and yellows glowed alive under a deep blue and purple dusk sky.  We pulled over and shot pictures until the light disappeared. 

The first day we were scheduled to SCUBA dive, strong winds cancelled the trip, so we took a short side trip up the mountains to visit the Dorrigo Rain Forest.

True to its name, Dorrigo is a card-carrying subtropical rain forest.   Because of the coastal geography and steep hillsides, the park gets hundreds of inches of rain a year.  The drive to the Park at the top of the mountain reminded me of some of the old highways leading to the Blue Ridge Parkway.  Narrow, steep switchback roads are punctuated by turn-offs for the spectacular views.

Like most of Australia, the sounds in the park are as amazing as the sights.  We all spent much of our time trying to see one bird in particular because of its very distinctive call.  It let out a very high pitched tone, almost too high to hear, followed by what sounded like a laser shot in a Star Wars movie.  Susan finally tracked one down and checked it out.  It's called a Whipbird.

Walking through the rainforest would be next to impossible without the established path.  The ground-level vegetation is so dense as to not be able to see through it, let alone find a way. 

Above the ground level vegetation, there was a large gap without much growth until you reached the forest canopy.  At least 100 feet above the forest floor, the canopy blocks out most of the light.  Anything that does filter through is dull and mottled.  Moss grows on just about everything, and water constantly drips off trees and down the hillsides.  We took the Wonga Walk, a 5.8 km hike which includes the Crystal Shower Falls and Tristania Falls.  Another longer path has five more waterfalls which we didn't get to see.