Stairway to heaven

Saturday was an extremely memorable day, the kind of thing that I'll likely still remember when I'm 83 years old sitting in a retirement home somewhere. As usual, I was a little later getting started on the ride to O'Reilly's than I'd planned, but the 15 minutes was fairly easy to make up, most of it was gone by the time I reached Canungra (after riding through the beautiful gorge) and started the 900-metre climb. The views up here are great, but what I really came for was the walk to Stairway Falls with the Gold Coast Hiking group that I discovered on the Internet a couple of weeks ago.





They turned out to be a great group. Friendly, adventurous and supportive. The walk itself involved a descent into a valley to the Blue Pool, before a trek along the rushing Canungra Creek to the falls and back, and a total of 12 unbridged creek crossings. There were, of course, the obligatory leech attacks (which caused some rather interesting reactions from Louise, our "fearless" leader), and a few obligatory falls in the creek (one of which cost me a pair of sunglasses), but it was worth it in the end.





On the ride home I was left to reflect on the day, and realised just what this experience meant. I don't know if any of us would have been able to follow the "track" and make it to the falls individually, but collectively it could be done. Sometimes it's also nice to find people with whom these experiences can be shared, and this day really had everything. I plan to make this the first outing of many with this group. There's talk of a climb of Mt Cougal next month -- all I can say is "bring it on".