When we arrived at Glycosmis, we were the only boat around. We picked our way into the shallow inner bay and dropped anchor along the north shore. Glycosmis usually has two waterfalls that tour boats like to duck under to give the guests on their bows a shower. This far after the wet season has ended, the falls were down to slicks on the rock face. The bay was a picture of quiet and solitude.
After a nap to make up for our early rise, we got in the dinghy and headed ashore for the “trail” to the top. I used the quotes because there isn’t one, per se. The surface is mostly bare rock and boulders, rather than a dirt groove in the ground, so the guidance was mostly to head in a general direction in a general area and look for cairns and any obvious trails through the spinifex.
That part of Glycosmis Bay is all sheer cliff face, apart from one section of boulders where the wall has collapsed. That makes a scramble up them the only route to the top. Some helpful soul had at least marked the best spot to tie up the dinghy, followed by a general direction (up). Specifics after that were few and far between (but we did have a photo with a line of the approximate route up from a friend.
Pretty Glycosmis Bay
Maryanne and I each took several routes after spotting a distant cairn that ended up being dead ends where we had to retreat before getting to it. Maybe they weren’t cairns after all. The whole place is loose rubble. Everything looks like a cairn.
After a lot of near-vertical climbing and shuffling sideways along three-inch wide ledges over big drops, we arrived at an edge where I could reach the only available handholds for the next bit, but Maryanne could not. It was one of those spots where we really didn’t want to go back, so I climbed over, braced myself and then pulled her up.
I wasn’t actually on a ledge, but on a knife edge on the other side of her. When she got her weight over the lip, she started sliding face first down my side toward a big drop. I had to quickly get underneath her, catch her and then spin her around to where her feet were at the bottom again so she could grab the knife-edge and pull herself off me.
I think I spotted another cairn above, but getting there required a fairly big leap with long legs to get there, so I said I would just go have a look and see if that might be a way we could go. Maryanne had already decided it wasn’t and was making her way along another route. She had to go down a bit, but was now making her way up a crevice on the opposite wall of a gap between my boulder and hers. The gap was so deep that the bottom was hidden in darkness. It was at least four stories.
I was feeling pretty pleased with the big, wide shelf upon which I was now standing. I could see that I was now only about three meters from the top. My shelf disappeared behind me. Ahead of me, it rounded the corner toward Maryanne and narrowed to the width of my foot. Then it shrunk to half that size before finally reaching another big boulder wedged into the chasm. In four more steps, Maryanne would be standing upon that one. After that, it would just be regular old walking on top of the escarpment.
This is where I had my scariest moment. At the half shoe-width section of my ledge, I had to make two big steps before I could step onto Maryanne’s nice, wide boulder. The wall above me was a little past vertical and I needed to use handholds to keep me glued to the rock. I had a good one to start, but for the last step all I could find was a largish pebble embedded into the conglomerate over which I could hook the end of my left ring finger. This was with the four story drop into the darkness behind me. Well, I owe my life to that little pebble and whatever forces mashed it so firmly into place.
At the top, it was just a matter of heading generally parallel to the cliff and looking for cairns to verify that we weren’t too far off course. At the end, where the ground started descending toward the pools of the remaining riverbed, we saw our first Boab trees (These look similar to the African Boabab trees, but are a different species). These distinctive trees have giant bottle-shaped trunks topped by short branches and look like prehistory itself. We went down to where the waterfalls normally plunge off of the cliff face and took pictures of the beautiful bay, plus that one sailboat.
Once we made it to the top, we enjoyed a delightful wander about - and especially loved the large boab tree
The way down to the dinghy was better than the way up. We started with Maryanne’s crevasse route, found the join with the wrong route from which we had come, then a much more straightforward path down. We think we may have even located most of our missed cairns from before. It’s still not good enough that we are ever going to want to do it again, though.
The next day, faced with a choice of that or the climb, we chose a walk on the beach fronting the outer bay. Everything was going great until Maryanne spotted cow pats. Apparently, feral buffalo and cattle are one of Australia’s most dangerous animals because of their foul tempers, fierce territoriality and constantly being underestimated by a human population paying more attention to croc and snake dangers. We didn’t see any, but we sure kept our heads on swivels.
A lovely beach walk
We moved Begonia to the outer bay at Glycomis to a site that is reputed to have aboriginal rock art. Armed with vague directions, we headed into the bush on an overgrown trail that quickly dispersed into far too many options that had probably been laid down by wallabies. We continued in the general direction of a waypoint we had, looking under ledges and climbing into caves along the way. We spent hours up there and never found any art. It was pretty, though, and the views were stupendous.
Eventually, sick of being shredded by spinifex, we headed back to Begonia to prepare for a few days of sailing to the next area. As we arrived at the dinghy, one of Odyssey’s tenders arrived. Odyssey was anchored in the next bay down the coast. Maryanne had passed on our tip about the art to them, so they showed up to have a look, we wished them luck.
We tried hart to find any rock art, thankfully it is a pretty enough to be ashore
After hoisting the dinghy and putting the motor in its hidey-hole, the Odyssey guys passed by to say the place was a gold mine of art. “A hundred plus” they kept saying. They showed us their track. We had basically been one block too far to the east the whole time. Well doesn’t that figure? There was no way I was up to reassembling the dinghy all over again. Plus, we were leaving early. At least we could feel good about pointing them toward a site about which they hadn’t previously known.
As we were finishing up our early dinner, Odyssey itself arrived in the bay. Michael, the Captain, said he came to see it to see if it might be a good place to add to their itinerary. He asked if we wanted to go to the beach to join them. When Maryanne explained about our dinghy and motor being packed away for the passage in the morning, they agreed to pick us up in Homer instead.
When they arrived, it was just five Odyssey crew and us. They had ditched their guests for us! Well, not really. They don’t want to take their guests, some of whom are elderly, on an unknown excursion for an unknown goal. This was intended to be a high-speed reconnaissance trip to assess viability. They were trying to be back onboard in an hour.
We hit the beach running and it was a struggle to keep up with the fit, young crew. We no longer tiptoed from rock to rock trying to avoid the spinifex, but instead blasted right through it like charging buffalo. Sure enough, they took a right where Maryanne and I had gone left and we found LOADS of amazing art and it really was at about every third place we looked. We had just enough time to take a quick look at each one before chasing the next person who called out that they had found another one to theirs. Jayden, who seemed to be Odyssey’s photographer, had the hardest time. She was trying to get good pictures of it all and was constantly having to run between sites to keep up.
Finding art is apparently 'EASY' (once you have your eye in!)
We all pretty much fell through the spinifex back to the beach. Homer picked us up, dropped Maryanne and me off at Begonia, then the crew returned to their guests. Within half an hour, Odyssey was steaming north out of the bay for an overnight passage west. Wow! How lucky was that?
It was then that we really had a chance to process what we had seen. The paintings we had seen today were Bradshaw type. Aboriginal paintings come in two types. Bradshaws are the older. They are essentially prehistoric to “modern” aboriginal paintings that go back 5,000 years. Some Bradshaws have been dated as old as 40,000 years, with the average being 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. These paintings are older than the pyramids, older than ancient Greece, older than the ruins at Skara Brae in Scotland, older than anything in Europe. In fact, apart from maybe a few things in museums, these paintings are most certainly the oldest human artifacts we have ever seen. They aren’t in museums. You can crawl under a ledge and lie in the red dirt gazing up at them in situ.
One theory is that the continuous line between the two styles was broken by the last ice age, when the changing climate caused populations to abandon their home areas. It’s that part that really got me. Not only have these paintings been here for a really, really, really long time. When they were painted, this was a different place. The ice came and went far to the north and south. The forests turned to desert and then to grassland and then to rainforest. The rainforest returned to grassland and then changed to mixed scrub. The sea level was 140 meters lower then, which meant these paintings were made in deep ravines in a mountain range nowhere in sight of the sea, not where someone can anchor a boat a five-minute walk away. Now the hills have worn down to where the art is under overhangs of boulders sitting on the tops of the smooth hills. EVERY single plant in the area, even the most ancient Boab, is several generations from even being a seedling. The plants that were there when these paintings were made have all long decayed into the soil. Through all of that, the paintings are still here patiently waiting, while every now and then, a human face stares up at them and wonders about what they mean and who made them.
[Maryanne]Thinking of visiting the Kimberley with your own boat? – Check out our Cruising the Kimberley Tips
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