The Grand Detour of Leven Canyon

We had meant to drive to Preston Falls. That was the plan, such as it was, but a sign twenty kilometres short of it pointed toward Leven Canyon, and the plan dissolved in the usual way. We turned off, followed a narrowing road through thick bush, and within half an hour were standing at the edge of something that made the quiet stretch of river at Bannons Park feel like a different waterway entirely.

Leven Canyon drops roughly three hundred metres through forested walls, and the Leven River, which had murmured past our campsite a few days earlier as though it had nowhere to be, ran through the bottom of it with real force. Cruickshanks lookout sat at the top, fenced and vertiginous, the kind of viewing platform where you grip the railing before you look down and grip it harder once you have. The gorge opened beneath us, steep-sided and heavy with ferns and moss, the river a pale line far below. We stood there for a while without saying much, adjusting to the scale of it.

We camped nearby that night, a small site tucked into the forest at the canyon's edge. Setting up the bus had become routine enough by now that the work was done in twenty minutes, and what followed was the sort of evening that made the detour worth the deviation. An echidna appeared at the edge of the camp, a short-beaked Tasmanian one, small and round and moving with the particular unhurried confidence of an animal that carries its own armour. It came within a few metres of the bus before noticing us, paused, assessed the situation with apparent indifference, and continued on its way. Anth filmed it. Sal stood very still and grinned.

The canyon floor walk the next morning was harder than the lookout had suggested. The track dropped steeply through rainforest, the steps uneven and slick in places, and by the time we reached the river at the bottom the legs were asking questions about the return climb. Down there the canyon felt enclosed and serious, the walls rising on both sides, the water louder than it had any reason to be. We climbed back up slowly, earning every metre, and arrived at the top sweating and quiet and carrying the particular satisfaction that only comes from a walk that pushed back.

Preston Falls, the original destination, came afterwards, almost as an afterthought. We stopped, walked to the top and then down to the base, admired the cascade, and moved on. It was a good waterfall. But the canyon, the unplanned one, was what we would remember from this stretch, and both of us knew it before we were back on the road.Read more