Bushwalking Index
Access to Mihi Gorge and to Salisbury Waters below the junction with Mihi Creek
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Mihi Gorge
Photo: Don Hitchcock September 2003These photos and accompanying text are for the interest of armchair travellers only, and do not constitute comprehensive instructions for bushwalkers.
The trip to the Mihi Gorge is for very fit, very experienced and well prepared bushwalkers only. There is no maintained track once you reach Salisbury Waters, it is very strenuous, and bush craft, topographical maps and compass are required. If there is the possibility of needing to camp, sufficient appropriate equipment should be carried. Always carry a Personal Locator Beacon, and tell reliable people where you are going and how long your party will be away. Mobile phones do not work anywhere in the gorges for sure, and almost never even on top of the cliff line.
There are two main ways to access Mihi Gorge and Salisbury Waters below the junction with Mihi Creek, neither of which is without problems.
1. Follow the track from Dangars Falls to Salisbury Waters, and continue down Salisbury Waters
- Not recommended2. Drop down to Mihi Creek at or before the last lookout down Salisbury Waters when following the track.
1. Follow the track from Dangars Falls to Salisbury Waters, and continue down Salisbury Waters
None of these three possible routes is recommended
- Swim the "Long Pool" which you come to not far downstream from where the track meets Salisbury Waters.
- Take the "High Road" by heading up the true left gorge wall when you get to the "Long Pool".
- Take the "Space Walk" which is a narrow ledge above the rocks bordering the true left of the lagoon.
Swimming the Long Pool is not normally a problem in full summer on a hot day for experienced bushwalkers who have done such a procedure before. The essentials are to waterproof your pack, to be a strong swimmer, and to take measures to ensure that you get to the end of the pool safely. It is imperative that swimmers in the pools encountered in the gorges take steps to avoid hypothermia. I have seen Long Pool covered with a thin layer of ice in midwinter. Under such conditions swimmers have died after swimming no more than thirty metres or so, much less than the length of the pool. It should be obvious, then, that swimming Long Pool is only an option in high summer, on a hot day, with full understanding of what is involved, and appropriate skills and equipment.
The second option is the High Road. Follow Salisbury Waters downstream from the track end to where rock blocks the side of the stream, on the true left of Long Pool. Move to your left up the gorge wall. It appears at first that all you have to do is get over a minor outcrop of rock, but you will be forced higher and higher on the gorge wall until you are dumped out at a high traverse on deep, unconsolidated, unstable soil and gravel at its "angle of rest", an exposed route and an unnerving experience for most bushwalkers. I've done it once, I don't want to do it again.
The third option is what I call The Space Walk. This is a narrow ledge of rock above rocks bordering Salisbury Waters, half way up the boss of rock which bars further progress down the stream.
Even guide books from thirty or forty years ago talk of this as a "difficult traverse". It is at the time of writing, 2011, in fair condition, but should be approached with great caution, and is suitable only for very experienced bushwalkers with a head for heights.
2. Drop down to Mihi Creek at or before the last lookout down Salisbury Waters when following the track.
These routes are in my opinion the best of a bad bunch. Great care must be taken.
The guide books talk about two possible routes:
- Follow a creek down to the Mihi, about 800 metres above the junction with Salisbury Waters
- Follow the right hand ridge to the Mihi from the last lookout on a short side track, just before the final drop down to Salisbury Waters on the main track.
I am not sure which creek the guide books speak of. I went down a gully further down the track from the Sarum Lookout turnoff. It was very steep, and started to get steeper. I traversed to the nearby ridge on the left which was much easier to descend, but it eventually came to a steep drop off. I then traversed left again across a small gully to another ridge, which led fairly easily into the Mihi. The ridges on the true left of the Mihi all seem to finish with a steep entry to the creek bed. I cannot recommend this route, though it is certainly doable. It is a long route for a start.
The best route down so far as I can tell is to go to the last lookout on the Salisbury Waters track, on a side track just before the final drop down of the main track to Salisbury Waters.
There are two ridges, the one on the left goes straight down to the Mihi/Salisbury Waters junction, and is a good route except for the last fifty metres. For the last fifty metres there are two routes I know of going up, but I would not like to come down either of them.
Instead, it is better to take the ridge on the right, which eventually drops into the Mihi about 300 metres upstream from the junction with Salisbury Waters. It is steep at the top and at the bottom, but is not exposed at any point, if you follow the main ridge down. It is certainly possible to get "hung up" on some cliffs if you try to drop off the main ridge, but with normal care and common sense the route is quite feasible. The ridge curves to the left near the bottom. The last fifty metres are quite steep, and I found a way down through the branches of a fig tree. I had to sit down and put my feet on the next foothold twice, but that is about it so far as difficulty is concerned. The ridge is not for beginners, but otherwise is quite straightforward.
Bushwalking Index
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My background
Some people have expressed interest in knowing a little bit about me. For those people, here is a potted biography:
I live in New South Wales, Australia, and I am a retired high school mathematics/science teacher.
The Donsmaps site is totally independent of any other influence. I work on it for my own pleasure, and finance it myself. I started before there was an internet, when I thought I could do a better job of the small map on the end papers of Jean Auel's wonderful book, Valley of the Horses, by adding detail and contour lines, and making a larger version. I have always loved maps since I was a young boy.
I had just bought a black and white '
fat Mac' with a whopping 512 kB of memory (!), and no hard disk. With a program called '
Super Paint' and a lot of double work (hand tracing first the maps of Europe from atlases, then scanning the images on the tracing paper, then merging the scanned images together, then tracing these digital scans on the computer screen), I made my own black and white map.
Then the internet came along, the terms of my internet access gave me space for a small website, and Don's Maps started. I got much better computers and software over the years, Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator for example, and my maps became colourised and had more detail. I did a lot of maps of the
travels of Ayla from Jean Auel's books, and I gradually included other pages with more and more photos available from the web, and scanned from books or from scientific papers, since I was not happy with the quality generally available. I became very interested in the Venus figurines, and set out to make a
complete record of the ice age ones. Along the way I got interested in archaeology for its own sake.
In 2008 my wife and I went to Europe, and when we arrived in Frankfurt at sunrise after the 24 hour plane trip from Sydney, while my wife left on her own tour with her sister, they visited relatives in Germany and Austria, I went off by myself on the train to Paris. Later that afternoon I took a train to Brive-la-Gaillarde, found a hotel and caught up on lost sleep. The next morning I hired a car, and over the next four weeks visited and photographed many of the original archaeological sites in the south of France, as well as many archaeological museums. It was a wonderful experience.My wife and I met up again later in the Black Forest, and
cycled down the Danube from its source to Budapest, camping most of the way, a wonderful trip, collecting many photos, including a visit to
Dolni Vestonice in the Czech Republic, as well as visiting the Vienna natural history museum. Jean Auel fans will realise the significance of that trip!
Luckily I speak French, the trips to France would have been difficult or impossible otherwise. No one outside large cities speaks English (or they refuse to). I was travelling independently, not as part of a tour group. I never knew where I was going to be the next night, and I camped nearly everywhere, except for large cities. I am a very experienced bushwalker (hiker) and have the required equipment -
a one-man ultra lightweight tent, sleeping bag, stove, raincoat, and so on, all of which I make myself for use here when I go bushwalking, especially down the beautiful gorges east of Armidale, though for Europe I use a commercial two person lightweight tent, since weight is not so much of a problem when cycling or using a car, and in any case my wife was with me when cycling, once along the Donau from its source to Budapest in 2008, and again from Amsterdam to Copenhagen and then up the Rhine from Köln to the Black Forest in 2014, both of which were memorable and wonderful trips.
In 2012 we went to Canada for a wedding and to visit old friends, and I took the opportunity to visit the wonderful Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia, where I took many photographs of the items on exhibit, particularly of the superb display of artefacts of the
First Nations of the Pacific Northwest.
In 2014 my wife and I did another European cycling tour, from
Amsterdam to Copenhagen, then from Cologne up the Rhine to the Black Forest, camping most of the way in each case, and taking many useful photos in museums along the way, including the museums at Leiden, Netherlands, and
Roskilde in Denmark, and the National Museum in Copenhagen. Again, I later hired a car and did more photography and visited many more sites in France.
In 2015 I made a lone visit to all the major museums in western Europe by public transport, mostly by train, and that went very well. I had learned a lot of German while travelling with my wife, who is a fluent speaker of the language, and of all the European countries, Germany is my favourite. I feel comfortable there. I love the people, the food, and the beer. Germans are gemütlich, I have many friends there now.
I repeated the visit to western Europe in 2018, to fill in some gaps of museums I had not visited the first time, because they were either closed for renovation the first time (such as the Musée de l'Homme in Paris) or because I ran out of time, or because I wanted to fill in some gaps from major museums such as the British Museum, the Berlin Museum, München, the Louvre, the Petrie and Natural History Museums in London, the Vienna Natural History Museum, the important museum in Brno, and museums in northern Germany. It takes at least two visits, preferably three, to thoroughly explore the items on display in a major museum.
I spend a lot of time on the site, typically at least a few hours a day, often more. I do a lot of translation of original papers not available in English, a time consuming but I believe a valuable task. People and fate have been very generous to me, and it is good to give back a very small part of what I have been given. With the help of online translation apps and use of online dictionaries there are few languages I cannot translate, though I find Czech a challenge!
Life has been kind to me, I want for nothing, and am in good health. Not many in the world are as lucky as I am, and I am grateful for my good fortune.
My best wishes to all who read and enjoy the pages of my site.
May the road rise up to meet you.
May the wind be always at your back.
May the sun shine warm upon your face;
And may rain on a tin roof lull you to sleep at night.
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