May 2011 - Maynard Falls
At one moment during the early morning of our last bushwalk we almost considered cancelling it, because there had been 23 mls of rain overnight and we knew that we were walking through waist-high ferns in a rain forest.
Luckily we didn’t, because the day turned out to be fine and we managed with, almost, dry clothing.
Les Mitchell once again led our bushwalkers, this time on an exploration of the rain forest that leads to the base of Maynard Falls.
What an experience: for 6.5kms the on-road walkers became off-roaders. We walked firstly along a fire trail and then plunged (fully sprayed with leech deterrent) into the undergrowth; scrambled over mossy boulders; swung from thick Tarzan vines; jumped from one wet rock to another in the creek; admired a massive red cedar, a cabbage palm and a stinging tree all hundreds of years old and looked upward, hundreds of metres, to the top of the escarpment from where the Falls tumbled in all their glory.
From the road they had looked to be thin and trickling, but up close they were roaring and mighty.
There doesn’t seem to be a lot of information on these falls, but perhaps they were named after Henry Maynard who was the Kangaroo River Company Butter Factory manager in 1913.
The factory had started in 1890 and was just south of what today we call Maynard’s Creek; fourteen years later the site was moved to Glenmurray. The falls only reliably run after wet weather so they are not a permanent feature of the valley escarpment.
Thank you to Les for another wonderful day: his knowledge of the bush and its trees never fails to amaze and enlighten us and his generosity with his time is very gratefully received by, the usually, on-track bushwalkers.
Lee Sharam