Jamison Valley circuit ’21, part-1

Bushwalk – circuit of the Jamison Valley, December 2021. It is the valley you see from the lookouts at Katoomba and Leura in the Blue Mountains, west of Sydney. Day 1.

“In the whole spectacle there was a persistent, pervasive hint of stupendous secrecy and potential revelation; as if these stark, nightmare spires marked the pylons of a frightful gateway into forbidden spheres of dream, and complex gulfs of remote time, space, and ultra-dimensionality. I could not help feeling that they were evil things—mountains of madness whose farther slopes looked out over some accursed ultimate abyss” (H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness).

“You’ll feel like you’re on the edge of the world” says the National Parks website. Like the blurred edges of a Turner painting, Sublime Point at Leura, and the entirety of the precipitous escarpment overlooking the Jamison Valley does feel as though it is a boundary between worlds. “Sublime”, especially in the era when the locale was named by Europeans, means more than beautiful. It evokes something far deeper, terrible even. The vastness of the Jamison Valley is indeed “something…intangible, majestic, even ethereal” (Anne Lyles). To know the sublime, to quote another art scholar (Edmund Burke), is “to be alive to the massive possibilities that seem to exist beyond one’s capacity really to grasp them”. Like the “earth’s secret and archaic gulfs” that haunted H.P Lovecraft’s nightmares, the imposing vastness of the Jamison Valley is sublime and, always just beyond the limits of our peripheral vision, menacing and powerful.

Blurred and misty edges, terrible precipices plunging into dark, unseen and dripping depths, and a vast inaccessible wilderness close and yet cut off from the rational suburbia of the Blue Mountains villages. The Jamison Valley has always felt to me a place of magic, not necessarily malevolent. As a child it was an other-world. The damp bushwalking trails cling to the very edges, its fastness remote and unknown. The prospect of somehow wandering off the tourist trail seemed dangerous, not to mention the thrilling horror of maybe becoming “benighted” in those chilly depths.

According to some, Yowies inhabit the eastern slopes below the mighty Kedumba Walls, nightly heading up the cliffs to bother or menace locals along Tableland Road at Wentworth Falls. Others say they live in the remoter-still Cedar Valley, just over from the Ruined Castle to the west. Was it really wild horses Jamie Neall heard crashing about in the scrub over there during his 12-day ordeal lost in that trackless, tangled maze?

All this maybe explains the sense of foreboding I often feel when now I venture into that place. “Turn back” an inner-voice cried as I picked my way down through the gloomy rainforest of Fern Bower, following the tumbling Cascades to Leura Forest. “Go the other way” the voice implored as I passed by the last exit track back up to the well-worn Federal Pass “tourist track” as bushwalkers dismissively refer to it. I ignored to voice and pressed on, regardless.

Of course, to paraphrase Lovecraft again, it is fear of the unknown that supersedes all other horrors. Once in the place, it loses much of its dread. There is even a road down there, a fire trail officially, but even paved in its steepest parts. It runs down Kedumba Pass from near the old Queen Victoria sanitorium (haunted, of course) and branches off to run along Sublime Point Ridge up to the site of former sewage works below Leura. That place is now just some grassy clearings. There were also mines down there at the foot of the cliffs below Leura, gold, and coal. Yet, even with all this, it is still a lonely and inaccessible place. And always, there is this atmosphere…

My plan, day one of this Jamison Valley circuit bushwalk was simple: walk until it starts to get dark, then find a decent place to camp for the night. With about 4 hours of light left after a late start, I made decent progress ambling at an easy pace. A couple of trail runners passed me headed in the other direction and I saw a man camping by the ford at Leura Falls Creek (I’d have liked to have camped there, but it was too early in any case). As the sunset I was on the lookout for a flat spot to set up. It had been so long since I was last there that I couldn’t remember what good spots there were so, about 8:30pm, I settled on a leafy clearing off the track somewhere along Sublime Point Ridge. My needs were simple with just a bivvy bag and raincoat-tarp instead of a tent.

The night was long and uncomfortable, it being months since last I camped, but uneventful. No Yowies, no scary noises, no people. It was mostly too hot, and mosquitos troubled me through the mesh screen millimetres from my face. But it was peaceful, and it was beautiful. The haunting premonitions from earlier had vanished with the kilometres and the hours.
Part 2 of my Jamison Valley circuit bushwalk, most likely briefer, is coming soon.