If you’re looking for an expensive new hobby to step up the notch of your adventures, explore places and waterfalls rarely visited with a side of potential painful death then CANYONING is for you!!
It is an incredible sport with an incredible community within NSW, but it is certainly hard and dangerous. Beautiful slot canyons with sculpted rock, crystal clear water and thundering waterfalls are usually balanced with one hell of an exit hike (or climb) and dense prickly Australian bush that wants to punish you for being there.
The advice I have for any newbies looking to get into the sport is to book a guided canyon tour. There are many incredible touring companies in the Blue Mountains who will show you the ropes, literally and figuratively. They will take you on a full day out spending the morning learning basic abseiling techniques and getting you comfortable on a rope before taking you on a beginner’s trip through Empress Canyon.
Canyoning tour companies are operated by trained canyoning guides, so you are as safe and well looked after as can be. They lend you all the required equipment so if you don’t own your own, no worries. It’s a safe space to learn how to use canyoning equipment for the first time or to experience a canyon environment to see how you like it. I would not recommend going out on a canyon with people you’ve met in a facebook group, with friends (unless very experienced/guide level) or by joining a local bushwalking club if you are a beginner. All of these community groups or friends are not trained guides and it also puts the entire group at risk if something goes wrong. Fork out the money and learn with a trained guide, and when you have a few canyons under your belt start branching out to the social groups.
Eagle Rock Adventures and High and Wild are companies I have booked tours through and can highly recommend.
Ahhh now that all that is out of the way… onto the fun stuff!
Empress canyon is a bit of a rite of passage for any beginner canyoner, mainly due to its proximity to town and easy access but it’s also the most popular canyon used by canyoning tour companies.
Therefore, Empress was my first ever canyon! I joined a canyoning tour with High and Wild back in 2021. I had heard so much about canyoning and new heaps of people who were getting into the sport and I wanted to see what it was all about. It was EPIC!
It is one hell of a way to experience a waterfall, and kinda trumped hiking to one.
Now, when I say be careful who you canyon with, the second time I ever did Empress I went with someone who claimed to be as experienced as a guide (cocky if you ask me) but I didnt know any better and believed them. After heavy rains we headed to empress canyon, we passed a few commercial tour groups so everything felt pretty normal, got to the top of the abseil and the person I was with set up the ropes.
I headed down, and about halfway down realised the waterfall looked pretty mean and spicey, I couldn’t fully see where I was going and there was plenty of white water, I tried moving out of the heaviest part of the flow as much as I could but remembered you need to keep anchored straight on the rope and essentially follow a line below your anchor, if you move too far to the side and slip you’ve then created a pretty spicey and painful swing for yourself.
I recall the person I was with said the way to deal with heavy flow was to just go through it, which was terrible advice, but as a beginner I just followed what they said and went through. Luckily, I got through okay, a slight slip and a sore ankle but fine otherwise. It must not have looked fine as a guide from a tour before me anxiously asked me if I was alright as soon as I broke through the water, they looked like they had been waiting on the edge of the pool to jump in and save me. I was a bit confused, but after a climbed out of the pool I noticed the water pressure was so hard it had ripped by whistle off my helmet, and I notice all the guided groups were using the dry line which has an easy early exit so you don’t have to pass through the lower half of the waterfall.
I got lucky on this day, but something could have easily gone wrong, this is why it pays to pay for a guided trip with experienced guides and be careful who you trust in a canyon environment! Your life is not worth any risk or poor decision. Below is the image I took of empress on this day, which doesn’t look as bad as what experienced canyoners are used to, but for a newbie it was a risk!
I have now done empress 3 times, which is a very low number for most regular canyoners, but I find on weekends it is just too busy, with social canyoners and with guided groups, so I do tend to avoid it most of the time.
It is a beautiful canyon though!! And I do plan on many more Empress trips in the future.
Some very slight light beams walking through the canyon!
The top of the only abseil in Empress Canyon is my favourite part of the canyon, there is a beautiful big pool you can jump into and feels like you are inside a big cavern that spits you out into one of the most touristy populated spots in the Blue Mountains. Its quite a wild experience to move from busy tourist spots to calm quiet wilderness and back again.
Rachmartee 
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