IT’S PERVERSE, REALLY. To walk  these mountains you start by descending rather than climbing.

The reason is that the Blue Mountains do not rise from a plain to culminate in high ridges and peaks. They are a plateau formed when the earth here uplifted millions of years ago. The Blue Mountains are a dissected plateau and the most interesting country lies deep within the folds of their heavily forested valleys.

Looking across the valley to the ridge of Mt Solitary.

Memories come while sitting quietly in the fading light of a winter’s day. Once again, I see the girl in the blue shirt, blue jeans, long blonde hair spilling from a cotton cap. She stands there on that high track, looking out at the massif that is our destination. Mt Solitary is our first walk into the wilderness. It was also our first venture into another life, had we known it.

The pack on her back is a basic affair of dark green canvas. I heft something similar loaded with the things we imagine we need for a weekend in the Blue Mountains — sleeping bag, warm parka, tent and a little food. Sure, those packs didn’t carry our load all that well, but we were young and things like that didn’t matter all that much. What does matter is that we are far, far from the dingy streets of the city.

We had talked of doing this for some weeks, months perhaps. Whenever the idea came up it gained strength until we decided — hey, enough talk… let’s just go next weekend.

The Golden Staircase was our route from the top to the track that runs along the base of vertical cliffs of yellow sandstone. On the other side of the track the land continued to fall, though less precipitously, through a dense eucalypt forest. We knew that somewhere out there, some kilometres to the south, flowed the Cox’s River. We don’t know if was a big river of one of those narrow, fast flowing streams that are sometimes graced with the name of ‘river’ when ‘creek’ would be more apt. We felt its allure while pouring over a map of our route and felt that sensation that comes when you gaze at maps and wonder… what it is like out there?

Not all that far…

Mt Solitary is not all that far from Katoomba’s Echo Point lookout, the place where tourists gawk at this marvelous landcape and, if they are sensitive enough, hear its quietness. This is the silence of wild places and it’s an audible silence. Stand apart from the crowd and, when conditions are right, you notice it as an almost subaural tone, an aggregation of all the sounds out there.

We stand looking over a deep valley towards our mountain. The map indicates a trail ascending the northern end of the ridge and this we trace by eye and wonder how long it will take to reach it. Our route follows the popular track in a broad arc that clings to the base of the cliffs, past what appears to be a recent landslide —- big, fresh-coloured rocks that have not yet weathered to the ochre yellow of those longer exposed. Further around now, near the side track that ascends a sandstone spire, we stop to look at a number of old coal mines. These date from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The entrances are barricaded but we find we can get into one where we notice just how low these tunnels are. Who mined them and how did they get the coal up to the plateau? Via a vertical trolley like that back in Katoomba that now hauls tourists?

Malaita a long way, but Solitary close by

Further on and high above us the plateau juts into the valley to end at Malaita Point. Malaita is a long, mountainous island in the Solomons archipelago and a long way from here. The point was named for a man from that far, tropical island who lived out here in a shack in the early years of the twentieth century, a time when doing that was possible. But why? Why so far from home? His story remains just a series of questions and I wonder whether he sat out on that point high above the broad valley and, in his solitude, felt that deep tug inside that is the yearning for home.

It’s not far to the start of the climbing ridge and this, for novice mountain walkers, we find an exhilarating experience. The track to the climbing ridge was easy walking, progress along it simply a matter of one foot in front of the other, over and over. The ridge, as we start to ascend it, is rough and narrow and as we climb the vast valley of the Cox opens to view. Looking back, we see the grand curve of the cliff face below which the track runs. And, below that track, the land falling to the forest-congested depths of the valley and on to the unseen river.

The day has moved into early afternoon. Some of those yellow cliffs are now in shadow. We stop frequently to catch our breath and to look at the unfolding views until we eventually run out of ridge and stand on the narrow plateau that is the Mt Solitary summit ridge. It is late afternoon but, being summer, there is still plenty of light left in the day. Near a low cliff we drop our packs and pitch our cheap nylon tent on the sand. We find water, just a trickle in a small, nearly dry creek. Tomorrow we retrace out steps to make the arduous, vertical climb out of the valley and onto the plateau.

This, our first ‘serious’ venture into the mountains, would lead to further treks and, sooner rather than later, to a place with an abundance of mountains. Tasmania was far from the Blue Mountains, but there, at least, you started off by climbing, not by descending into a valley.

And the Cox’s River that appeared so far away and so intriguing on that map? One day, I would stand on its banks and ford its shallow waters. But that was years in the future and it was to be without that girl in the blue shirt with her long blonde hair that spilled over her shoulders as we stood and looked to the blue bulk of Mt Solitary that summer day long ago.

And there it is. A big bird, white head and chest, black wings, in a big blue seascape edged by the golden sands of a coastline that stretches all the way north towards the Gold Coast.

An iconic image of the the far north coast of NSW — Mt Warning on the horizon, the bay and a sea eagle.

On my morning walks from town to Cape Byron and back I got to know that big grey bird that the walker told me about. It was often there on that broken branch of that grayed, dead tree. One day, I was lucky enough to watch it feeding on some silvery fish it had scooped from the ocean surface. Other times it would sit passively, only the occasional and barely perceptible movement of its head giving away the fact that it was awake.

I saw that walker who had told me about the bird again, too. He was one of the early morning regulars, people who walk by themselves or with a friend or two to to get some exercise before the heat of the day made such activities sweaty and uncomfortable. They start from somewhere in town and walk up the road that takes you to the lighthouse, then down the track along the edge of the cliffline, down to Wattegos Beach. Or, sometimes, they — and I — might go other way with the steeper climb up the cliffline track making a tougher route.

When you start early enough you made the walk in the cooler light of early morning. Leave the same time in winter and you started by streetlight, the sun still well below the horizon. There’s a delicious strangeness to starting then and you arrived on Cape Byron in time to watch the sun rise from the eastern ocean.

On those winter mornings, when you to look to the northern horizon and see the pale glow there, you realise just how close is the Gold Coast. Look hard enough when the air is clear — binoculars help — and you see the top of of some of those Gold Coast high-rise spires. Closer at hand, though still a great many kilometres across the bay, are the scattered lights of the Pottsville area and, looking out, I wonder if there is some early riser at the same time looking towards the strobing beacon of Cape Byron on which I stood.

The lighthouse on Cape Byron seen on an early morning walk to the Cape

Sometimes, there’s the visual treat of watching a pod of dolphins close to the shore or, in the right season, of watching a humpback whale leap from the sea to splash down into it with a great spray of foam. This is a special place and it was fortunate to live here.

Seen from Cape Byron, the sun emerges from the Pacific. The sculpture was one of a number along the Cape Byron walking track during the annual sculpture festival.

Less a town than a landscape

Some say that Byron isn’t much of a town… that it doesn’t have the visual cohesiveness of Noosa’s town centre, up on the Sunshine Coast, that it is overpopulated by transients… but that’s not what matters. What matters is not the town itself but its setting, for the best thing about this nook of the north coast is the landscape. Where else do you find visions of long beaches and hills and distant mountains framing your northern horizon?

That’s why I always stop on those early morning hikes to sit and gaze from Cape Byron, to see the landscape in the grays of an early winter morning with the lights of town and farmstead still twinkling in the folds of the hills and along the stretch of the coastline, just before the sun comes over the horizon; to see the that vast bay and those mountains painted in the blues of early morning; then to descend the cliffline track, enter the low forest and emerge at the end of Wattegos.

The Border ranges and others closer frame the view from Cape Byron over Byron Bay to the north. Mt Warning, the plug of an ancient shield volcano, stands above the ranges to be the first point of the Australian mainland to receive the sun.

Those critics are right about Bryon — it isn’t much of a town. Just an ad-hoc collection of buildings, old and new, clinging to the bay at the southern end of its long, curving sweep where it takes a turn to culminate at the Cape.

But Byron is mare than a town. It’s a landscape where sea, mountain, coastal plain and beach come together in a geographic juxtaposition that pleases the eye and the mind, and in doing so made those early morning treks to the Cape so worthwhile, and the sight of that sea eagle perched on its dead branch a reminder that, here, geological history has created something truly inspiring and beautiful.

CLAAAANG! Someone slams the car door and the party sets off into the early evening gloom of the rainforest. A short slope leads  from the forestry road to the Fish River.

Here is the first challenge. The river is perhaps 10 metres wide and too deep to wade, even if anyone would be dense enough to really want to do that on a cold, early-winter evening. But there is a crossing, of sorts. Someone sometime ago felt public spirited enough, probably because they were fed up with getting soaked by wading the stream, to fell a tree across its width. In this they were remarkably precise, or lucky, as the trunk just manages to span the stream. Unfortunately, they were not quite public spirited enough to fix a handrail to help walkers cross, especially in the low light of a wintery evening. Maybe it is more to do with the fact that few hikers are motivated to walk in this place at this time of year at this time of day. Crossing, then, was a matter of balance, balance reinforced by the sight of the foaming waters rushing past below.

Some time after the journey described in this story, a proper suspension bridge, complete with hand rails, was built across the Fish River. Here, a hiker crosses the Fish in its summer flow.

While it may not be accepted among the bushwalking fraternity to describe the crossing as incomplete without a hand rail – a suggestion which would produce strange looks behind which lay the unspoken epithet ‘wimp!’ – the trouble with the log is that it is round and slippery. This calls for great care in traversing the Fish.

“Keep your pack on but undo the hip belt. That way, if you slip and go in, you can shed the pack – it won’t push you down into the water”, come instructions from the blonde and bearded South African as he prepares to venture across.

This is the art of crossing slippery logs over swirling, cold rivers: place one foot very carefully in front of the other, keeping to the very top of the log; test your step before committing your body weight to it; move very, very carefully and spread your arms straight to the sides in an attempt to keep your balance; you unintentionally rock sideways a little but succeed in remaining standing; finally, breathe a sigh of relief when you reach the other side. Now, watch the others attempt the crossing to see who goes in.

The walk into the Walls of Jerusalum does not always start on early winter evenings, a time when the sane are sitting around living room fires. Nor is crossing the Fish usually so dramatic, it is just that in winter it carries a little more water that is more than a little colder than it is in summer and that enjoys flowing faster.

There is a hut tucked into the eucalyptus at the top of the climb through the forest and it is here that late-starting parties spend their first evening. The climb is warming this winter evening but it can be sweaty in summer – cooling breezes, here in the shelter of the forest, are few.

The open country

“Supurb – the open country”. This, or something very like it, is what the more exuberant exclaim as they attain the plateau and look out over alpine tarn and pine. It probably has as much to do with leaving the close, enclosed world of the forest as with coming into country in which you can see for kilometres, assuming there is no fog and no rain or snow is falling.

Truly, it is supurb up here. The feeling of openess, of being free to ramble over the rocky ground and not having your path prescribed by a track cut through the forest can be exhilerating. The plateau here – it is on the edge of Tasmania’s Central Plateau – is an undulating landscape dotted with lakes. In places, the underlying dolerite breaks through the thin cover of soil. Swathes of open country floored with rock or a peaty, soft and soggy soil provide walkers with leads into the heart of the plateau.

This is the home of the King William pine, renamed by those who know it the “King Billy’, a scrawny tree of modest height and twisted appearance, thanks to a genetic inheritance forged by millenia of adaptation to wind and weather. The tree grows in clumps, usually adjacent to the small lakes and ponds that pattern this landscape.

An occurance of snow

In good weather it is less than a three hour walk into the Walls. Progress is rapid because the rocky ground doesn’t degenerate into boggy tracks as it does elsewhere on this often soggy island.

The track twists and winds across the landscape, around the tarns, past copses of King Billy and up a low rise and – immediately in front – the imposing rampart of the West Wall. The long, flat-topped ridge rises imposingly from the plateau to a peak above Herod’s Gate, the pass through which walkers ascend to attain the inner sanctum of the Walls of Jerusalum.

With the woman doubled in pain, the party stop to discuss what to do.

The Walls appear to approaching walkers as a faded blue rampart simmering under the sun. That is in summer. This is the start of winter. By the time we reach the base of this final ascent we have been wading through snow knee deep, occasionally deeper.  Anybody who has done this will understand how exhausting it is and why walking groups frequently change the leader in these conditions. Trail breaking is tiring work.

When planning the walk we knew we could have snow but this, we imagined, would be only the occasional fall that accumulated to no more than a few centimertres. In deep winter and early spring, lovers of the cold traverse this open country on touring skis, those narrow strips of fibreglass that allow you to stride in that long, easy gliding motion that eats distance.

Visibility falls and we find ourselves in a blizzard. The wind is coming from the west and it is much stronger than when we came onto the plateau. Vision is ten metres, sometimes less. To make matters worse, one of the party sits doubled-up on the snow, holding her stomach. The others stand around in a circle – black silhouettes on white. There is a small hut some distance into the Walls but we have taken so long to reach this point that it may well be after nightfall by the time we reach it. And nightfall, here in these blizzard conditions, is no time to be out. Were we to overnight there, the snow, even were the weather to improve, would be deeper and the going even tougher than today.

Standing in the wind the party holds an impromptu conference – do we pitch tents out here and hope they do not blow away or do we wait to see if the young woman – the consensus is that she is suffering from exhaustion – recovers sufficiently to get back to the hut in the shelter of the forest?

The rest allows her to recover enough, so back to that hut we go. Nobody complains, however, and the feeling is that all are only too happy at the prospect of a warm evening indoors.

The return walk is slow. Someone has taken the woman’s pack and is wearing it to his front, a bizarre site out in this white landscape. We follow the trail broken on the way out. Walking is easier but the light, already lessened by the low cloud and falling snow, is fading.

We’re back inn the hut with the fire going. It is warm. We eat, talk, then sleep. The following morning brings the descent through the forest and across the Fish. No one falls in.

UP AND UP. Through a dark, wet forest of towering trees. Along a rough track that never saw the work of a maintenance gang. Squishing through muddy patches, slowing as we climb the steeper sections. All familiar stuff to mountain walkers.

It feels as though we have been in this soggy forest for hours but, in reality, it cannot be more than two. For some reason, time this morning seems to be spinning out when, on ascents, it usually passes quickly. We walk on in silence.

The forest ends abruptly as it does on all Tasmanian peaks of this height. There is a transition to a scrubby vegetation of low trees and tall, wiry shrubs. These are tough plants as they must be up here where storm and wind prune the foliage and where winter brings its burden of snow.

Along a track

The door gives way with a push and we enter the small, single room. There is enough space for all so we squeeze in although the hut is only small in size.

Here we take a break before the final few metres up to the ridge. Out comes the food. We relax and talk, but we will be less relaxed when we returned to the hut in the afternoon.

Our path now is along a track that makes a narrow cut through the low scrub. It leads to the final, short pitch after which we stand on an open ridge and look into the heart of the South Coast Range. A splendid vision it is as we stop to take in a landscape of peak, valley and ridge, a landscape in which bare rock dominates. Only the most hardy of vegetation survives up here, protected from the weather by compact growth, stiff foliage and millennia of adaptation.

In the deep valley below are the grey waters of the twin lakes known as Pigsty Ponds. Southwards are more open ridges leading to the conical pinnacle of Pindars Peak. And there, in the far distance, standing above the wilderness beaches of the South West coastline is the corrugated ridge of Mt Bobs. The few who have traversed the trackless country from where we stand to that mountain, and from there down to the South Coast track, report thick scrub, difficult going and, according to one brave walker, snakes that move through the branches rather than over the ground.

This is landscape sublime over which we gaze for some time, as if a mere few minutes it too short to take it all in. It probably is. In the far distance lies the hazy blue of the Southern Ocean, a blueness that goes all the way to the horizon where it fades into a kind of greyish blur, sea and sky there being indistinguishable. Far beyond that, across a tempestuous sea, is the Antarctic.

This is visually inspiring country the openess of which invites you to walk on and on. You feel you could follow those open ridges way out to those distant peaks… they look not all that far away.  But distances here, in this clear air, are deceptive. This is a landscape with an absence of trees.

The day is advancing and we want to be back to the forestry road, where we left the cars, by nightfall. Walking is easy over the rocky ground, so we hurry on and soon stand by the summit cairn of Mt La Perouse. From here, the view is to Cocks Comb Ridge, so named because its profile looks like the jagged comb of a rooster.

Comparatively few Tasmanians visit the South Coast Range. Even fewer mainland walkers come here. Yet people do come; the trail up through the forest is evidence of that, and someone must occupy that little hut high on the shelf below the summit ridge. Perhaps it is only the firewatchers.

There are pockets of semi-remote mountain terrain like this tucked away all over the island state. They are bound, sooner of later, to be ‘discovered’ as more and more people search out places less visited. There seems an inevitability to this.

Fossils in the rock

“Look. It’s fossilised ripples in the sandstone”, comes the surprised voice. He turns over the piece of sandstone he holds in his hand.

Sure enough. There are a series of parallel ripples incised into the yellow slab. And looking around there are more scattered over the rounded hump of the summit, evidence of the massive movement of the earth over timescales unimaginable, but movement so substantial that they have made a mountaintop of what was an ancient seabed.

“This is just the remnant of what was, in the distant past, the sandstone capping of a much larger area of the state”, adds someone with greater geological knowledge. “Over all that time the capping has been eroded down to the underlying dolerite. Now this bit, up here on the mountaintop, is all that remains”.

Return

We return the way we came out to Mt La Perouse. The onset is as sudden as it is unexpected.

It happens like this: We walk in sunlight under a blue sky. Coming close to where the ridge starts its fall to the narrow shelf below, from where it plunges as forest-clad slope to the valley far below, we notice a mass of grey cloud coming towards us. It is at our altitude and it has appeared with very little warning. Now, the temperature falls and then we are enveloped in this grey mass. Visibility is poor. A fall of fine snowflakes star to descend.

Most of us have experienced snow in the mountains in the non-winter months before, so we think little of it. Nor are we overly concerned at the cloud that obscures the shelf and its hut below.

Then, somebody notices that Grant is having difficulty. He had slowed and complains. Not feeling well, he says. But this is no place to stop, out here on the open ridge in a snowfall and declining visibility.

“Can you make for the hut?”, someone asks. We look at Grant . “It’s ok. I can make it”, he says quietly but in obvious discomfort. Flora, his partner, gives a nod of approval and we move on more slowly, keeping an eye on him in case his condition worsens.

At last, the edge of the ridge where the track descends to the hut… down the narrow trail through the low scrub, knowing that it will lead us to shelter although the hut remains invisible in the mist. Then it emerges out of the greyness and it is with relief that we push the door open and get Grant to lay on the bunk and rest.

“He’s exhausted, I think”, says Flora. “He was up late studying for an exam last night”. Ok, so it’s exhaustion, but to go on in this condition would be to risk hypothermia. We contemplate spending a cold night up here and I go through, in my head, what we will need to find… enough firewood for the pot belly stove to last through the night, water, cobble together what food we have that remains… and sufficient clothing to keep Grant warm. Only a few need stay, I think, the rest could go down and get assistance if Grant needs to be evacuated.

Flora sits with Grant and keeps him warm while the rest of us wait. We put off the decision about who will stay until the last moment, but that cannot be long because the day is moving on and no one wants to negotiate the slippery forest track in the dark.

And then the unexpected. After less than an hour, Flora says that Grant has perked up some and feels well enough to walk out. The rest and a bit of food has revived him although doubts linger about the wisdom of moving on. Finally, consensus is reached.

As we drive away the range is hidden by cloud. It had been a rare day in mountains often obscured by poor weather, a day among the peaks and on the open ridges, a day we thought would become two had it turned into a rescue.