Wednesday 16 September, 2026

Rob with what remains of an old bridge.

Rob and Steve enjoying their lunch break.

Hunting for gold in Bullock Gully where the fossickers path ended.

Crushed quartz rock left by the fossicker.

Steve couldn’t resist climbing into one of the accessible mine shafts.

Long, deep but very narrow excavations. How did they do it?

Narrow shaft. Clearly a one person job.

Clear waters.

Photos courtesy of Rob, Donna and Steve D.  Walk report by Walk Leader Rob.

Four walkers set off hiking to the old gold mines in the Clyde Ridge Roadarea. The route we had planned was modified when we started seeing a lot of pink ribbons downslope in the bush so we set off to do some investigations.

The ribbons started appearing on Mines Road South just north of some mine shafts. We discovered a recent 4WD track with freshly crushed grass and brush heading down towards Bullock Gully. The track stopped short of thecreek at a campsite with a walking track leading to the creek. There we found evidence of a fossicker who had been working the gravel beds and pools obviously looking for alluvial gold. There were many small pits and a number of piles of crushed quartz rock as evidence of the workings. We followed Bullock Gully for 500m until we met Clyde Ridge Road,seeing evidence of the workings all along the dry gravel creek bed.

We then headed up the road to the main area of mining activity. Gold was found in this area in the late 1890’s associated with quartz veins, so when the miners found a vein they dug long trenches some >10m deep and <1m wide. Other vertical shafts are 1m x 0.5m in size which were probably dug to see if a quartz vein extended to that area. When you see the size of the debris mounds and realise these were all dug by hand you can appreciate the effort involved and hope they had some good finds.

After a 4km walk back to the cars we had lunch near the bridge crossing of Currowan Creek. We all agreed this was an interesting days hike.