From City to Summit 1: Planning a Pilgrimage

It’s raining at home. Where the mountain should be there’s a ragged cloud, a dishevelled doona pulled up around a chilly summit. Perversely, it has me thinking about walking. Mountains always do that, even when they’re trying to sleep.

[Sunset over the Mountain] 

But today I’m also thinking about history, and Hobart’s history in particular, because kunanyi/Mt Wellington plays a big part in that. After a short-lived and fraught experiment on the eastern shore of the Derwent River, Hobart was founded in 1804 on the opposite shore, near its current town centre. Water reliability was the principal reason for that early move. And that in turn was encouraged by the regularity of the rain – and sometimes snow – that fall on the flanks of the mountain.

[Wild and well-watered: the top of kunanyi/Mt Wellington] 

A good proportion of what falls there ends up in the Hobart Rivulet. At less than 10km it is too short to be called a river. Still it proved a reliable and constant source of fresh water for the port of Hobartown. In my 28 years living alongside it I have never known it to stop flowing.

[Hobart Rivulet in its untamed state]

‘Though its lower reaches are now piped and tunnelled, and outflows from stormwater drains, factories and the city’s tip mingle with mountain-fresh water, the Rivulet’s upper waters are still used in Hobart’s renowned Cascade beverages. “Out of the wilderness” its beer advertisements once spruiked. We locals smiled at the exaggeration, yet were still proud of our city’s proximity to relatively wild places. How many other capital cities have ready access to such wildness?

Most work days I walk down that valley, close by the rivulet, “out of the wilderness” and into the city. Truth be told, I often yearn to be going the other way, towards the wild. So one day I decide to do just that. I will start from the comforts of a favourite Hobart café, and walk upstream to kunanyi’s windswept 1271m summit.

[Sunrise and moonset over kunanyi/Mt Wellington] 

While it’s hardly an expedition – there are tracks all the way, and it’ll be done in a day – it does require that I gain more than 1200m in altitude. So there will be sweat and effort required. But the more I plan, the more I come to see how much of that effort will be mental. Because the walk will involve transecting a slice of Hobart’s natural and social story, I will need to be alert not only to what IS, but also to what WAS. That makes it a symbolic journey: a kind of local pilgrimage to places with significant stories, human and non-human, past and present.

I want this to be a series not because it is a long walk, but more because it promises to be an involved walk. It won't be just an A to B bushwalk. Perhaps no bushwalk ever should be.

An Exchange of Light

[Winter sunrise, South Hobart]

 

If I believed in omens, then this was a good one. A day that took forever to come, preceded by a night that showed no signs of ending, had finally begun. And with a brilliant light show. The rising sun lighting the underside of unusually fluid cloud formations, had let the whole valley know about it. Even the preoccupied soon-to-be travellers, who were doing their best to digest breakfast while going through checklists and hopping up with an "ooh" or a "that's right!" or a "what time do we have to go?"

 

Perhaps all big trips begin with this: the nerves and doubts and anxious anticipations. Still it was good to be reminded that even if we were about to leave it behind for the northern version, the southern sun would keep rising here, just as it always had.

 

For weeks now that sun had refused to go into its winter recession. Late autumn and earlier winter had been mild. And dry ... so dry that one of my to-do items was to water the garden. In June! A local friend and I had agreed that we could only tell it was winter because the sun was going down early. In our valley it had started dropping behind the mountain well before 4pm. Not even climate change could alter that.

 

But unseasonally warm or not, the signs of winter: those smells and sounds and colours - or lack of them - were still plain. In the days before our departure the smell of apples in the storage boxes beside the brewery had returned, along with the trumpeting of scavenging currawongs. In the Cascade Gardens, the deciduous trees had become almost bare, their shed leaves adding a rich whiff to the air. On the Rivulet the ducks now rested, mute and sleepy, beside willows that wept for foliage lost.

 

It was hard to imagine exchanging this winter of ebbing light and life, for the full bloom of a far northern summer. Yet after an ugly transition - 30 hours in a noisy metal box, eating stale, over-heated food, trying to sleep sitting up - we landed in Bergen, Norway.

 

[Bergen, Norway from Mt Floyen]

 

And here we are, deluged with daylight, beset by blossoms, foraging fresh blabaer (blueberries to us). It would seem churlish to complain of jet lag. It's time to get out and see summer in the forests and mountains and fjords of Norway. The European adventure has begun.

 

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