Mount Bertha unexplored
This year we have partnered with the Bob Brown Foundation in their fight to end illegal logging on our beautiful forests.
This week we received a blog detailing a day in the life of Erik Hayward, Tarkine Campaign Assistant.
"The logging plan shows it’s looking at punching a fresh road through 2 km of rainforest to get to a remote pristine single coupe. I went In there over 3 days with Rob Blakers - a friend, comrade and epic wilderness photographer. Took us a day to get through the thick 2 km of scrub but were rewarded with an incredible Blackwood forest garden of eden. I’d like to say that no human has ever been to this place. I am confident no-one has been on this route in the last 150 years.Although the aboriginal mob roamed around tassie for over 60 000 years so when the climate was different they may have made it up here. It is vastly impenetrable. Horizontal scrub, bauera, cutting grass. The evil trifecta. Choose your own misadventure.
Hauled climb gear in - my lightest weight kit of a tape harness, lightweight Custom Canopy Campout DMM Ultra Os in lush forest green, wrench and landyard. 70m static and up a 500 year + myrtle. 30 m up in the middle of everywhere. Incredible.
An eagle flew by and landed in a taller emergent euc towering above me. Wild.
Worthless however to the logging industry. The trees are incredible old hardy hollow- riddled giants. Each base of its buttress roots flaring out the size of a London black Cab.
Myrtles here are the last in a long line of developing forest in transition from a bushfire landscape to cool temperate rainforest. Celery top pines straight as a die pointing to the sky. Blackwoods in groves live along the very top of this wonderfully forgotten, unnamed and undisturbed ridgeline. Their branches all fully masked in moss dangling down in long strands catching the dripping constant rain. Occasionally the sun peeks out showering the glossy forest and dangling beads of moisture in dappled golden light. Momentary, before more shadows and rain, to remind us of the fickle fragility of this Gondwanan world tucked away in the deep depths of takayna/ Tarkine.
The descent from this majestic guardian gives me temporary reprieve from the cold as my hand warms on wet rope. Then the rain comes in again.
We crawl out of there rediscovering more lost or undiscovered and unimaginably picturesque fern gullies, waterfalls, streams and dark dark nigh-impenetrable self- defending slopes never to be revisited. We hope.
Now I’m home and everything falls into perspective. Some heartless human in their vehicle left this young lady’s mother lying on the cold gravel down the road last night in the frozen mist.She’s feeding now. A Tasmanian Brushtail possum. The slaughter is endless. She’s warm and full. Content. Misses mum. But her ilk are epic epic climbers. We have a lot to learn from them."