Yileen Canyon

Getting a few chunky ropes into our packs, we started the canyon at 9am. I took a pair of UHF radios in case we had to communicate through the last pitch, as we've never done abseils this tall before. We ran a quick test on the channel with our favourite meme:

Vincent: Hello, how are you, I'm under the water
Me: Please help me, too much raining uwuuuu

As we were walking into the canyon, we heard other people on our same channel, possibly some rock climbers. It'd be funny if they heard all this and proceeded to make a strongly worded post on Facebook on the appropriate use of radio channels. 

2 kilometres in we reached the creek bed, and followed the creek until it became a canyon. The canyon was mostly dry for the first half, with a few deep wades that can be scrambled around. We still decided to put on our wetsuits shortly before the first abseil. First abseil was really short, just a few metres down a difficult downclimb. 

We all took a fleece as we were anticipating the canyon to be mostly dry and wetsuits to be obsolete. That wasn't the case, as we soon ran into a few deep wades and swims. Wet fleece became really heavy in our packs, and Adam stuffing it in his keg has also led to his keg being overstuffed and water started leaking in. 

A section of really mucky water. It looked like bubble tea had spilt on the floor.

From here it was lots of scrambling through the canyon. 

The second final pitch was quite scenic down a slot. It's not a long one but it does look really cool. The only scary bit was that as I was abseiling, a tiny rock dislodged from the ledge above and fell about a metre beside me. Probably the lesson is to be careful moving around the ledge while someone else is abseiling. 

After I've gone down, Vincent chucked his bag down, splashing into the water. Once we've taken everything off the abseil, Vincent had a quick look at his phone and discovered a large crack on his screen. The impact went beyond the screen protector and onto the screen itself, breaking a few pixels forming a green line, plus the front-facing camera. Unfortunate days for Vincent, as that would be a costly repair. Guess with the cost, there's little reason to repair, and he'll spend a few years being an average high schooler where their phones are full of cracks, green lines through their displays, and areas of the touch screen that don't work.

Normally, phones are completely safe with bags being thrown around, but I guess for Vincent, his phone sat at the bottom of his pack, and has taken a lot of impact from the other contents of his bag. I normally keep my phone in the hood of the pack and have never had any issues with my phone. 

And the main (& final) abseil! There's the River Centre anchor, made of a red rope that goes straight through the waterfall flow, and the River Right anchor where we went down, which is dryer and goes more to the side. We did it as a 40m abseil down to a dry ledge first, where there are bolts for a 10m rebelay. Some people also do both as a combined 50m abseil. Tying our 50m and 60m ropes together, Adam went first using a VT prusik as a self-belay. 

Vincent went next, and using radios, we coordinated a test pull to see if anything could be potentially jammed in the rope retrieval process. It was an easy pull-down with the knots passing smoothly past the ledge. I went last, also using a VT prusik as a self-belay. Retrieving the rope was easy, but sorting two ropes and organising them was the painful part. It didn't take long till we're ready for the short 10m drop to complete the waterfall abseil, where we had lunch and changed back to our walking outfit. 

The waterfall was really dry with not much water flow. There's probably more water in my toilet bowl than in Yileen. How would we rate this canyon? Vincent gave it a 2-star rating. Overall, there were some nice sections, but that wasn't impressive enough to justify breaking his phone and getting his stuff wet. I have a "is it worthwhile to come up to the mountains" rating, and that's certainly a yes. It might have been more fun if there were more flow through the waterfall. The canyon finished at Pierces Pass carpark on the tourist track, where we jumped on our car shuffle back to our car 2km up Bell's Line.