A walk on the mountain

[shapeofthings]

Yesterday was the solstice, and a perfect winter's day: warm, fine and mostly sunny. What better way to celebrate the returning sun than to hike up the Mountain?

Not all the way though! It's been a long time since I've been well enough for serious walking, so we took a fairly easy route to Junction Cabin, about half way up.

How stunning are these heath flowers? I didn't expect to find them in the middle of winter, but the fire trail was lined with a profusion of tiny pink, white and mauve blooms clinging to spindly branches. They soon disappeared as we headed on up, along the Old Farm track.

Up and up though the strange silence of the eucalypt forest^[1] until we reached Junction Cabin, the half-way hub for tracks spider-webbing their way across the mountain-face.

A light lunch, shared coffee and welcome conversation with a radio-physicist and his wife before starting down again, following the water's route down Myrtle Gully - all moss-slicked stairs and tree-ferns with their twisting stems, reminiscent of dadaist imaginings.

Much of the Mountain is young re-growth, recovery from fierce fires in 1967. The slopes are dotted with the still-upright corpses of the forest that was, beautiful white giants that come crashing down with the wind. The ghost forest itself regeneration after the timber-getters stripped the mountain bare.

Water seeps, pools and trickles down into the gully, dripping from mosses and worrying at the Mountain's stony bed. The dampness clings through narrow channels where the sunlight cannot reach.

From time to time we stumble upon an unexplained mound of crumbling stone, moss-encrusted. Water supply for the early settlement, most likely, but still a little mysterious.

Tree-ferns sprout from unlikely foundations, their numbers increasing as we descend and the little creek gathers momentum.

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Down and down and down we go, treading carefully and keeping an eye out for the inevitable leeches (success! We emerged with all the blood we started with!)

Through the dark forest of twisting ferns, where the creek twines and swirls, chattering madly on its rush towards the drop:

The journey ending in the rush of white-water and an enchanted view.

[1] Strange to me: the sub-tropical gum forests I grew up with hum with insects and bird-call, but down here there are far fewer species and the handful of birds are eerily silent.