Burly, Beautiful, and a Little Bittersweet

The trees of Styx Valley are not as tall as coast redwoods. They’re not as wide as sequoias. At 350-400 years old, they’re younger than many trees I walk amongst at home.

Their majesty lies in their experience: weathered by storms; standing tall, proud and defiant; leafy branches reaching high to enshroud broken, weathered, dying crowns in leafy halos. Bark hangs and twists in deep red strips, striped and shorn through age to leave silver wood gleaming from the trees’ upper reaches.

Swamp gums, the planet’s tallest flowering plants, rise from damp ground cushioned by soft red matter. An understory lush with tree ferns so aged that woody bark blanketed in moss hangs in stiff spikes, oddly evoking a stegosaurus flipped bottom-up. Once again, for the space of a couple hours, I feel like I’ve stepped into prehistory.

By afternoon, I’ve driven from the Styx into Southwest National Park and set myself a six-kilometer stairmaster in disguise in the middle of nowhere. Somehow, the views totally and indisputably justify the journey. Crimson Christmas bells rise like rubies from the heath as I climb. Rays of sun stream down through clouds, turning Lake Pedder’s dark gray water to gleaming silver, ringing islands like a halo beneath me.

My hut, looking over Southwest National Park to the west, is also home to a friendly bush rat who does his damndest to find his way around the wires and plastic bottles protecting our food.

He fails.

When I scramble to the mountain’s top the next morning, rugged ranges ring the lake in a shining, shadowed, 360 degree panorama.

I continue on with a weathered gentleman across a rolling, boggy plateau, scramble over a couple of haphazard boulder fields and cling tenuously to a few meters of cloud-dampened, slopey dolerite as we navigate our way around Mt. Anne’s top columned tiers, stepping around an exposed airy arête far above a sheer ravine to gain her summit.

When we summit, she’s cloaked in cloud. She makes her own weather, mist materializing as wind rises swiftly, swirling and twisting and turning over her summit. We sit for an hour, waiting. Twenty seconds after we start our descent, the sky begins to clear. We look down through clouds to ridges, spires, tarns, lakes, shelves and valleys in every direction, cut by a single, lonely tan gravel road. Federation Peak’s distinctive spire spears into the air from the Arthurs’ jagged ridgeline to the south; Frenchman’s Cap rears white from the northwest. In a region of Tasmania famed for dastardly weather, the Southwest has gifted me with a glorious, hot sunny day.

In a region famed for dastardly weather, though, those circumstances are also more than happy to change on a dime.

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The land surrounding Frenchman’s Cap is wild. Swirling masses of white quartzite and dark rock rise from plains and valleys and ridges to jagged, unruly peaks, somehow both fluid and rough in their rugged beauty.

Wind brings driving rain the night before I begin my walk, preceded by a quilt of deep gray cloud laid low and smooth over mountaintops, undulating as it passed over peaks; thickening and thinning; darkening and glowing in whorls throughout the sky.

I spend two days hiking through boggy plateau and climbing rocks and roots up narrow passes. My trail passes puddles filled with purple carnivorous plants and skirts mountain lakes as they reflect the day’s first light, clear blue playing against deep golden ochre. It cuts upward through thigh-high steps hewn into gnarled, rough roots worn smooth and glistening white quartzite blocks. It ducks between formidable black mountain gateways shrouded in cloud and dances along knife-edge ridges over ravines filled with eucalypts crowned in bright blossoms, so spectacularly deep and vibrant I have to stop to stare to keep from tripping over my own feet.

I leave my pack at a small hut nestled in the thick brush around Lake Tahune– a small, deep, circular pool nestled in the sheer cradle far beneath the Cap’s white face. I follow a kilometer and a half of elusive cairns as I scramble up soaking rock, contouring the back of the mountain’s dome toward the summit. Even up here, in an isolated, windswept, barren rocky expanse, wild irises thrive. Deep, muted purple and pale yellow-green blossoms open from slender stems, extending from crevices wherever some slight shelter from the wind can be found.

My summer's last summit proves burly, beautiful and a little bittersweet, welcoming me in classic Tasmanian fashion: it’s completely socked in. Wind tears over the edge and I look out into a world of white.

I wait a day and a half at lake Tahune, warmed by a rickety old coal stove as mist hangs in the trees over the lake around my hut, hoping for another weather window for a clear summit. It never appears.

I descend from the soft clouds engulfing Frenchman’s Cap on the morning of my fourth day, and my thoughts turn to the last six weeks. Rarely have I been so entranced by a place in so short a time. The summer has been a rush of rugged wilds and waters, beaches and communities, new friends and old, all of whom have fully embraced me on this portion of my ragtag journey. My summer has been filled with challenge and joy, has taught me and allowed me more self-discovery than I ever expected.

The sky clears to a flawless azure after I’ve left the major passes behind, half way along my 22-kilometer journey back to the car park. I turn back from the trail’s last crest to watch serpentine cloud flow over the mountain, covering and clearing as it wraps and parts and blankets the rock in its path. My chest tightens and that hole opens inside me as I leave part of my heart and soul in the mountains, as always I do.

Mountains, more than anywhere else, are where I experience joy and beauty, disappointment and despair, and sheer unmatched wildness. Mountains are where loneliness can turn to aloneness– not necessarily the hollow sort.

Mountains, I’ve long known, are where I truly belong. By whatever roundabout way my path takes me, eventually I’ll find my way back to higher elevation.

The mountains are where I find myself.