Date: 12+13/9/2026
Trip leader: Elias Dunstone
Party: Ngiak Kang, Yessentay
I’d been thinking about this trip for a few months, and eventually found a good weekend, before the weather gets too much hotter to make bushbashing more unbearable. The idea was to follow the known route down Wall’s pass to Cedar creek, camp in a known camp cave, and then follow Cedar creek downstream before climbing a ridge up to the base of Mount Solitary, following the cliff base around to Korowall ridge, and the ascending the ridge via a known pass. With advice from someone who’d previously made the Wall’s pass to Ruined Castle crossing as a day hike, I decided to push the plan for the first day a bit longer, for an easier second day. I ended up with a group of 3 for this trip, which turned out to be very convenient for the bushbashing terrain, as more people would’ve slowed us down considerably. Packing for this trip, I decided to take a 20m rope, harness, and 3 helmets, which turned out to be incredibly helpful.
Due to line closures up to Blacktown, I met Ngiak Kang on the night bus around 3:45am, before changing to the BMT, catching up on sleep and then meeting Yessentay in Katoomba at 6:30am. Yessentay gave us a much appreciated lift to Narrowneck lookout after a quick grocery stop, and we set off before 7am, with some great views of the fog in Megalong valley spilling over Narrowneck into the Jamison. Heading along at around 5km/h, we soon reached the firetower marking our turnoff from the main track, where we followed an indistinct old firetrail for a few hundred metres, before turning North to follow the ridge to the top of Wall’s pass. At times I thought I could see traces of a footpad along this ridge, but for the most part it was just bushbashing which already had me questioning my choice to wear shorts to combat the warm weather. We reached a cairn marking the spot to head down to the cliffline and find the pass, and the bush started getting a bit denser. I eventually managed to climb onto a boulder and spot the flat rock platform and chains of Wall’s pass, and we got down to the top around 9:45am.
We stopped for some snacks and appreciation of the views across Cedar valley, as well as visualising our route plan, before I set up the rope to lower down our packs. After lowering the first pack, I realised that we would in fact need someone at the bottom to unclip the packs. So, Ngiak Kang abseiled down and unclipped the rope, which I brought back up to top belay Yessentay and then lower the next 2 packs at once (not a fantastic idea). I then threw the rope down and downclimbed using the chain myself, which was somewhat sketchy, but completely doable for anyone with some experience with exposure and rock climbing. After all the snacking, photography, route planning and faffing with the rope, we had the rope packed back up at 10:30am.
This when the route started to get difficult. We had to traverse the cliff base through dense scrub to Cedar head, however some circumspect route choices by me brought us down to a dead end ledge, forcing us to return the way we came, up a pretty steep and slippery scramble. It was also at this point that Ngiak Kang lost his Garmin watch, which will most likely be lost to the Narrowneck scrub forever. Additionally, I lost any hope of succesfully completing the full route in our given timeframe, due to how slow it was to traverse these slippery clifflines whilst also dealing with the dense bush. With some very heavy support from Yessentay, shoving me up the small cliff, I made it up and set up the handline to help the others. From here we proceeded along a somewhat better route closer to the cliffbase, which brought us to Cedar head to enjoy some views to the North. Next, we had to navigate a series of small clifflines off to the right of the ridge. Presumably there is a route which doesn’t require handlines, but we weren’t able to find it for all the scrub, and instead used the rope a few times, bringing us down onto the main ridge down to the valley. Here we headed down through some varying terrain, sometimes sliding down through ferns and lawyer vine, or walking through flatter and more open areas. After realising we were heading down the wrong ridge, we contoured around, before the gully between deepened, avoiding some very diplomatically labelled “particularly bad” scrub. After reaching the correct ridge, I informed the others that we had made barely any progress towards the 400m of elevation we needed to lose to reach the creek. This proceeded on for a while, with a few more small cliffs, lawyer vine patches, and one patch of grasses and saplings where the best way of progressing was to fall forwards and flatten a path with my body.
We eventually the lower, flatter slopes, where the scrub really opened up (sometimes we could even walk normally) and we had to pick our route down to Cedar creek. After looking at a few previous routes on trip reports, we decided to follow a small creek down the hillside. This turned out to be very slippery (me and Yessentay both ended up with one soaked shoe from this stretch), and we had to get down a couple of small waterfalls, but at least it was a change from the dense surrounding scrub. We eventually got close enough to hear Cedar creek, although we were still about 30 metres above it. This led us to try first the right, and then left bank of our small creek for a pass down to the creek, which we found without much difficulty, by checking past reports. With a bit more scrambling, we were finally down in at Cedar creek, and 100 metres downstream, we walked into the massive camp cave where we’d be camping, at around 5pm.
Although I’d seen photos of the cave on trip reports, seeing it in person was incredible. The roof is a flat slab about 20 metres up, with some huge boulders and a small flat area underneath. There’s also a well formed fire pit, seats, and a sleeping platform. I’d read reports of a cave-in, and there did seem to be signs of somewhat recent debris, however there’s still enough space for a few tents. We finally enjoyed a very late lunch/dinner (we expected to be down at the cave a lot earlier), filled up water, set up (me in my hammock outside the cave), and set a fire. All tired from around 7 hours of intense bushbashing, we soon headed to bed. It was decided that the next day we would climb straight up to Ruined Castle, a known route, and then return via the Golden Stairs. We had a slow morning the next day and set off around 9:30am up a ridge directly across from the camp, which was more manageable than the previous day, with less dense bush and less clifflines. Our original plan was to contour around to hit Cedar gap, instead of doing 170 additional vertical metres to reach Ruined Castle, however this proved more effort than it was worth due to how much worse the vegetation was off the ridge. Hence, we reached the track quite close to Ruined Castle after about 2.5 hours of climbing, and enjoyed a more reasonably timed lunch atop Ruined Castle with the multitudes of tourists. After running into Kosta and telling him of our challenging time the previous day, we headed off back to Katoomba at a good pace, happy to be back on a trail. We slowed down a bit heading up the Golden Stairs, and finally made it back to the car around 2.30pm, thoroughly exhausted.
Although we didn’t achieve my original goal, I was happy with how the trip went, as the cave was such a cool and rarely visited place to camp, and the sense of accomplishment of reaching it was quite good. I would like to do something else in the Cedar valley in the future, this time with full knowledge of the challenges involved. The small group made the trip especially enjoyable, huge thanks to Yessentay and Ngiak Kang for coming along.
