Daintree River Flight
Daintree River - Same river, four completely different phases — all in one flight this morning, flown from the mouth upstream.
It starts at a sandbar the tide changes every single day — the exact point where the Daintree hands its sediment over to the coast. Turn upstream from there and the river changes for a reason that has nothing to do with gradient: salt and tide. The mangrove creeks are shaped by water reversing direction twice a day rather than flowing one way — a different mechanism producing a familiar-looking curve.
Further upstream again, past the ferry towards the village, the river starts to meander. Every bend has a quiet, matched pair of opposites at work — a point bar building out on the inside curve, a cut bank eating into the outside one. None of this is a river slowly settling into place, either: a study of this exact floodplain found it's been through at least four cycles of catastrophic stripping and rapid rebuilding in the last 6,000 years — and all of it under intact rainforest, with no clearing involved.
By the last leg of the flight, deep in the rainforest, the valley closes in — and the riverbed itself changes. The sand that built every bend so far starts giving way to bare rock, and by the time I reached a tight horseshoe bend well upstream, the floor was rock, full stop. That bend isn't building a new bar the way the others were. It's cut into stone, and stone doesn't rebuild itself on a human timescale — so this bend has probably looked much the same for a very long time.
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Cheers Kevin