Rock stacks and cairns
Tuesday 12 April 2022: ‘Opera House Cave’ on the Orroral Ridge of Stone ! – M/E-M. Pop up the Orroral Ridge Road and to the ‘Opera House Cave’.
Summary
Distance: 10km | Climb: 385m | Time: 2hrs 25mins moving plus 3mins of breaks | Grading: M/E-M; M(8).
Photographs
Photographs are available here.
gpx File
Download the gpx file recorded via AllTrails here (in AllTrails, activate …, Download Route, Select the file format GPX Track, OK).
Another version of the gpx file, recorded on my Garmin MAP66i GPSr, is available here. It has a few waypoints in it which the AllTrails version doesn’t. Sorry about the security warning at download – if you follow through the various prompts it will work (I recently applied an SSL certificate to my blog; everything else works fine, except for these download warning messages).
Track Notes
I recently saw a video of rock stacks in a private (so you can’t access unless you are a member) Facebook group, Hiking in Canberra. The location was the ‘Opera House Cave’ on the Orroral Ridge of Stone. I’m certainly not suggesting that the poster put them there. They just panned a video round the cave.
I have an aversion to rock stacks. Judiciously placed cairns are ok by me, but rock stacks are like graffiti tags and totally out of place in the natural environment.
So I decided to go up and have a look.
Drove to the Honeysuckle Creek camping ground and set off up the Orroral Ridge Road.
Not much sowing and reaping on the side of the Orroral Ridge Road
Nice views up to The Spinnaker.
The Spinnaker from Orroral Ridge Road
Lots of improvements to the fire trail.
Plenty of new drainage work on the Orroral Ridge Road
Lots of signage in the car park at the top, signaling the start of the footpad NW along the Ridge of Stone.
Start of the footpad NW from the Collimation tower car park
The new-ish blue signs about the place are using the Australian Walking Track Grading System.
Walked through the indigenous site.
Indigenous site (with track marker)
As I understand it, this is site NA43 from Winston-Gregson’s 1978 Masters thesis ‘Gudgenby: a register of archaeological sites in the proposed Gudgenby National Park’.
Winston-Gregson site NA43
After about 1km the track ends.
End of track signage
It deteriorates too!
That’s the track
100m further on there’s a dip in the footpad and the way down and into the ‘Opera House Cave’. Before entering, I went a fraction further for views over the Orroral Valley.
View across the Orroral Valley from just below the track descent to ‘Opera House Cave’
In the cave there was a rock stack near the wall on the right.
Rock stack
I made it disappear.
No rock stack
There was a rock stack at the back.
Rock stack
I was going to make it disappear, but relented and turned it into a small cairn as it points the way to the crawl exit to the lovely viewing slab above.
Cairn
The dastardly deed completed, I retreated up the footpad a bit. There’s a route with a couple of tapes that goes further along the ridge to the Trojan Wall and Sentinel Rocks.
Tapes mark the footpad further to the NW
Wandered home.
Track Map
The AllTrails recorded track map is here, where you can pan and zoom. And here’s the track laid out on my old TopoView 2006 map segment from the Corin Dam 1:25000 topographic map.
Track Orroral Ridge
Party
Just moi.
Vindicated
Vindicated
See ABC News report.
Linda Groom
12 April , 2022 3:40 pmGood on you, Grumpy Old Man, well done!
Johnny Boy
12 April , 2022 4:03 pm🙂
Lena Ostrovskaya
12 April , 2022 4:03 pmI went there on Sunday, armed with your map from 2019, and scrambled ingloriously up a wet, slippery rock opposite to the cairn to get to that viewing platform. So glad there was nobody around to observe me in the process! I also tried to follow the NW route along the ridge through the wet scrub, but gave up at the Trojan Wall.
Johnny Boy
12 April , 2022 4:16 pmYuma Lena. Golly, that would have been wet. The track, both past the ‘end of track’ sign and onwards via the taped route, would have been dripping! Yarra. john
Ian
12 April , 2022 5:09 pmGood start on your wilderness restoration career John. 1 cairn out of 2. A pass mark but could do better.
Johnny Boy
12 April , 2022 9:27 pmExactly the response I expected 🙂
Barrie
12 April , 2022 6:10 pmWell done. ribbons and cairns are an eyesore. Very few cairns are necessary. In general One shouldn’t be out there if one needs cairns to navigate. As for those two in the Opera Cave, I would have pulled both down. They are both entirely unnecessary. Go for it John.
Johnny Boy
12 April , 2022 9:29 pmKnew that would be the line from you, Barrie 🙂
Beat Oppikofer
12 April , 2022 8:24 pmto make high rock stacks, is art work, and needs very good rock stacking skills, as i have discovered on our Hume & Hovell track weekend, few weeks ago, when i was trying to build to replicate/ make high rock stacks @ our camp site (high rock stacks as we found when we arrived there), i don’t have those high rock stacks skills, i couldn’t balance all the rocks to make a high rock stack …..
Johnny Boy
12 April , 2022 9:30 pmAn unnecessary skill Beat 🙂