Paten Track Side Creek, again

Same walk as yesterday, but followed the creek a bit further. Probably only went about 50m further than yesterday as the foliage closed in a lot and I wasn't feeling like a real scramble.

Paten Track Side Creek

Boxing Day! Laziness, recovery, and leftovers. And a walk as it turned out. Since I haven't done any walking in about 5 months, and recent heavy rain made me curious about the state of the creeks around The Gap, I took a short walk in the Mt Coot-tha Reserve area accessible from the end of Paten Rd - one on my most frequent stomping grounds.

There are a couple of water-courses which I spotted during previous walks in this area (eg 1 Jan 2008) and which I have wanted to explore but have always found weed choked. One is the side creek feeding from the south (at grid 961627 on the Brisbane Forest Park map) into the creek which runs along the Paten Rd track. While walking along the Paten Rd track I noticed that the recent heavy rains have sent so much water through the water-courses that most of the weeds have been cleared out. From the track I could see the clean, bare rocks which form the bed of the creeks. So taking the opporunity to explore the cleared-out creeks I left Paten track at the grid mentioned above, and marked by the forked tree in the LH photo below, and headed along the creek-bed of a small feeder creek.



This is a lovely little creek which I'd love to explore further as I only went along it about 150-200m at most. I crossed this creek on my 1 Jan 08 walk and took a photo of a pipe it flowed through and which looked to be constructed of 44 gallon drums. Today I saw that the pipe was all but destroyed by the recent flows and much of the surrounding soil and rock has been washed away (see LH photo below).



A bit further up the creek I came across what looked like the ruin of a creek-side shelter. While it's now just a pile of buckled corrugated iron, the pleasant location right beside the creek makes me think it must have been a terrific little spot in the past. I can imagine either many adventures had by a group of kids or many hours of treasured seclusion enjoyed by some lucky adult.



All in all a lovely way to spend an hour and a half on Boxing Day.