Bushwalk Australia

Will be heading to lake rhona (and beyond) in a couple of weeks time. The long range forecast (so not totally realible) however, is showing 5 days of rain from about mid-walk. My question is, how fast is the Gordon river likely to rise and fall, and how much rain does it normally take to turn the crossing on the richea track into a non-crossing!

tough question i know, full of vaguaries, but would appreciate some comment. I'm not too keen on spending 4 days (like Buck did) waiting for the river to go down.

cheers
c

If you can wait a couple of days until I'm back at work, I'll try to get some river level and rainfall data and post it here. Hydro Tas has a lot of river level data available if you just ring and ask - it can take a while to get the right person though. Bureau of Met also has access to all Hydro's hydrological data too, but I'm not sure if they are set up yet to deal with ad-hoc queries from the public. Still, can't hurt to call them.

Cheers

Apparently it can rise pretty quickly. I'm pretty sure some friends of mine had to wait a couple of days for it to go down once.

I reckon its only going to stay up for a few days at most after a decent rain fall.
Generally this time of year its ankle deep and looks much deeper than it actually is.

I dunno I wouldn't worry too much.
Given a couple of weeks and the weather hopefully settles down a bit I'd be suprised if you had any issues.
Weather forecasts more than a week out aren't really worth paying too much attention to.

The river can rise very quickly, I crossed it at shin height and by next morning after a very wet night at Gordonvale we dashed back but the river was already too deep to cross. We waited a week but in the end we had to be ferried across in a canoe.

Roger

Okay, I had a look at some river level data from the Gordon near the Huntley rivulet (not far from Richea creek). This is old data from before the Gordon dam was finished - the monitoring site is no longer there. But I'm told the river hasn't changed much since then.

This first plot shows river level for Jan and Feb 1978. The first thing to notice is that the river can rise very suddenly. It can rise 1 to 2 m in about 2 hours. And it can take a couple of days or longer to drop back to more reasonable levels. This rise can happen even with only a small amount of rain if there is already a fair bit of water in the topsoil and the creeks feeding into the Gordon. So if you have any rain at all, expect the river to rise, and don't be surprised if it rises quickly.

The second plot is from winter of 1978. The key think here is to notice how the river level can stay quite high for an extended period. This will happen if you get an extended rainy period over a few days.

Oh, for the record, after a few days of serious rain, this monitoring site recorded a river level of 4.5m - but that was the max the site could measure, so who knows where it really got to

This time of year, extended rainfalls are unlikely, but check the latest forecasts before you head out just to be sure.

Hope this helps.
Alliecat

thanks heaps alliecat, big help. Some fairly scary scenarios there.

According to the forecast, the area is going to get a big dump later this week so by early next week when we head in we'll have a pretty good idea as to how quickly (or not) the river has receeded.

cheers
c

P.S. does anyone have a spare boat!

Maybe one of these would help