The Not-So-Plain Plains: Part 2

It’s blissful being horizontal at last, snug in my sleeping bag. The quiet of the forest is a balm, and as sleep hovers at my door, I turn over in my bag. Suddenly my body is gripped by a series of excruciating cramps. Everywhere from groin to toe spasms, and I can barely keep from screaming. As I writhe about, swallowing my squeals, I think desperately of crawling the 50 metres to Tim and Merran’s tent to seek medical advice! 

Today’s steep, scrubby, off-track walking has caught up with me. Despite taking magnesium – a good prophylactic against cramps – my 70+ year old body is letting me know there’s still a price to pay. I sit up, pull the toes of one leg towards me, and get some relief. When I do the same with the other leg, the cramping worsens. I try relaxing, stretching, sipping water, sitting up, lying down again, breathing slowly: any and everything. But for the next several minutes nothing gives me much relief. Eventually the cramp storm passes, and I lie breathless and uneasy on my left side, not daring to turn over. I just wait, hope and pray for sleep to come.

 

And eventually I do sleep, if a bit fitfully. In the morning I manage to crawl out of the tent and walk to breakfast with relative dignity. As we sip our cuppas and exchange tales of our night, I learn that sleep has eluded others too. Tiredness is no guarantee of sleep. I share my cramping episode, hoping to persuade Tim to keep our ambitions for today’s walk “realistic”. He seems solicitous … but I’ve seen that look before. He has plans, and the best I can hope for is that I won’t be left too far behind.

[Mt Pelion East peaks out behind Tarn of Islands]

Day packs filled, our first order of business is to visit the nearby Tarn of Islands. Merran has struggled to remember its name, and we amplify the confusion by playing with its name. First it's “Lagoon of Rocks”, then “Lake of Hills”, and finally the supremely silly “Pond of Thousand Island Dressing”. The tarn rebukes our folly by being both comely and large. It not only allows glimpses of some of the mountains of the Overland Track, it also (naturally) contains several miniature islands, some topped with small pencil pines. Even its small details are fetching. 

[Small details on the shore of the tarn]

If Tim’s agenda for the day is full, it is also flexible. He first dangles before us the opportunity to visit what he calls “my forest”. He describes a small forest that he’s camped in which has all three species of Athrotaxis pines adjacent to one another. We’re intrigued enough to consent, and we’re soon walking off in its direction. But on the way there’s an unplanned surprise. I catch sight of what I suppose to be a golden, sphagnum-covered rock, maybe 100m away. But as I look more closely, the rock moves! We all stop to watch. Is it a wallaby hunched over grazing? We’ve seen golden wallabies in the highlands before. When it moves to where we have a clearer view, we can see it’s a large golden wombat.

[The large golden wombat]

The day is fine and clear, though there’s a good breeze blowing across the low scrub. Fortunately it’s coming from the wombat towards us, so the animal hasn’t heard or smelled us. For some minutes s/he wombles slowly in our direction, grazing and picking at bits of grass among the coral fern. We watch entranced, photographing, videoing and exchanging quiet expressions of awe. None of us has seen a wombat as blonde as this. Were it a lion, we would undoubtedly describe it as golden. It moves within a few metres of us before I inadvertently knock my camera against its case. The small sound startles the wombat, and it gallops away from us. It’s hard to believe that a 30kg barrel-shaped, low-slung quadruped would be capable of such speed, but they have been clocked at over 40km/h; only a little slower than Usain Bolt! Our quiet bubble burst, we laugh and babble about this amazing sighting.

[Inside Tim's forest]

And now Tim must feel that “his” forest can only be a let-down. It isn’t. Although it’s younger and much smaller that our “home” forest, it is instantly appealing. For a start it has that rare combination of all three pine species – pencil pine, King Billy pine, and laxifolia (a hybrid of the other two) – immediately adjacent to each other. It also has some impressive “Grandma” myrtles, very old Nothofagus cunninghamii that reach high into the forest canopy. They also beautifully exhibit what is known as canopy shyness. Such trees, often of the same species, leave a continuous gap or channel between each other’s outermost leaves. It reminds me of that almost electric shyness I felt when I first wanted to hold a girl’s hand. 

[Canopy shyness in myrtle trees - photo by Libby]

The reasons for this botanical shyness are probably multiple, including to reduce mechanical pruning of each other when wind moves the branches, and to limit the spread of leaf eating invertebrates. But trees are as mysterious as they are remarkable, and the more we study them, the more questions we have.

 

It’s now lunchtime, and we find another reason Tim is so fond of this forest. At its grassy edge we sit in the sun, sheltered from the keen breeze, and look out over the plains. The humps and bumps of the foregeround are covered in scoparia, sphagnum and dozens of other hardy, low-growing plant species. We know the weather is not always as benign as it is today. In the distance, in the lee of small hills, we see pockets of gum trees and pencil pines. Tim spreads his arms towards the wide horizon, and assures us he’s never seen another soul out here. We tease back: “Not even one of the 0.5%?”

 

After lunch we continue our slow wander back, though Tim being our leader, there’s a diversion first. He takes us further west to where he had earlier found what he thought was the original boundary marker of the Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park. We find a large rock cairn on a knoll overlooking the Forth River valley, some 600m below us. We pause and salute those who surveyed and ultimately protected this wild country.

[Tim and the boundary marker]

[Lake Rosa]

And then we actually start walking homeward, first via Lake Rosa, a shallow lake dotted with water lillies, then down a long, wide valley through knee-high scrub to the unnamed lake we’d paused at on our outward journey. Ultimately we complete a nearly 12km long figure 8, and return to our forest camp early in the afternoon. It has been a marvellous day of off-track walking, but I’m not ashamed to say that the lure of an afternoon nap soon takes me tentward.

The Secret Highlands 2: Broken and Ugly

In the chill of the morning, while some of us were pulling sleeping bag hoods around our ears, Libby was up getting the fire started. The night before we’d decided there was no urgency about getting going in the morning. That, at least, was my excuse for staying à bed. But the warm flicker of flames that lit the hut proved the ultimate in gentle alarm clocks. How we humans are drawn to the flames!

[Drawn to the Flames!] 

After brekky we were in Tim’s hands. He suggested we pack lunch and head south, towards the February Plains. We were keen to explore this undulating plateau, with its grandstand views over Cradle Mountain National Park to the west, and the Walls of Jerusalem National Park to the east. But there was still cloud about, and views might be better with the clearer weather that was forecast for tomorrow. Besides, Tim’s agenda for today had a touch of the train-spotter about it.

In 1895, E.G. Innes and team had surveyed and cut a potential rail route between Mole Creek in the north and Rosebery in the west. Although the railway line never eventuated, some parts of his cut route can still be seen, including on a section of the Overland Track west of the Pelion Plains.

[Across the plains, with fire aftermath around us] 

Innes’ official report spoke of the landscape near here as “broken, ugly country”. After reaching what he called the Mackenzie Plain – probably part the February Plains – he “turned again south …. (and) skirted the side of the hill at an easy grade, through a country covered with a dense growth of myrtle and pepper tree.”

Tim was keen to find evidence of Innes’ Track, especially where it “skirted the side of the hill”. Innes had presumably tried to take a line below and to the east of the highest country in order to avoid the worst of the weather that can lash this area.

So after walking south for a short while, we swung east and began to wander up a broad, open valley. The only thing remotely “broken” or “ugly” about it was the widespread fire damage from the Mersey Forest fires of summer 2016. There was stark burned forest on the valley fringes; burned scrub and buttongrass in the valley floor; even cracked and blackened rocks. The same fires had burned east around Lake Mackenzie and the Blue Peaks, and south-east through parts of the Mersey highlands. They were started by dry lightning, a phenomenon thought to be one of the local outcomes of climate change. I’ve written about these fires here http://www.naturescribe.com/2016/02/a-tasmanian-catastrophe.html

As we neared the edge of the upland, we began to get partial views east across the deep Mersey Valley towards Clumner Bluff and the Walls of Jerusalem. Tim had marked on his GPS that this was where we might find traces of Innes’ work. The fires had made our search both easier and harder: easier because we could see further, and walk more easily through the fire-cleared undergrowth; harder because many windfall trees blocked our way and obscured the kind of evidence we were searching for.

[Searching for Innes Track] 

After a couple of hours of off-track scrambling, we admitted defeat. We’d seen hints of cut lines, but nothing that was continuous and unambiguous. For our troubles we were sweaty and blackened, so we sought the compensations of lunch and a view on a high rocky knoll. We scored better. A large wedge-tailed eagle graced us with its presence as we ate. It perched for some time in a bare tree just above us, then took off, circling above for a final look. In its honour we dubbed our lunch hill “Eagle Rock”.

[A wedge-tailed eagle at "Eagle Rock"] 

We decided we’d return to the hut a different way, just for variety, but managed to collect even more scratches and black stripes from having to push through thick burned scrub. It had been two and a half years since the major fire here, yet there were only glimpses of good recovery. The cliché that all Australian bush was made to burn, and recovers well from burning, looked far from true up here in the sub-alpine zone.

Wildflowers were fairing best, taking advantage of the increased light, decreased competition, and a bed of ash for germination. Orange everlasting flowers (Xerochrysum subundulatum) particularly stood out against the blackened trees. Some of the eucalypts and other alpine trees showed only sparse and sporadic regeneration. Many trees stood stark and dead. But we were surprised at one point to find a clump of myrtle beech (Nothofagus cunninghamii) shooting from the base of their burned trunks. I’d heard they could survive light fire by sprouting from basal epicormic shoots, but this was the first time I’d seen it. Presumably the fire was less severe in the wet lee of the hill where we found them.

[Orange Everlasting flowers thriving after fire] 

Our via the cape return trip ended mid afternoon, in time for us to collect more firewood. It promised to be a cold night, so the fire would be very welcome. But alongside our anticipation of a good fire, we felt a strong sense of irony. We’d seen some of the dreadful havoc that fire could wreak in this alpine country. And we knew too that the various types of human-caused fire – whether through deliberate ignition, or anthropogenic climate change events like dry lightning – had burned out acres of beautiful flora up here, and especially large stands of superb pencil pine. It’s hard to shake the feeling that fire will continue to push some of these species to a brink that would be truly “broken” and “ugly”.