There are some 20 self-guided walks in the area of Cradle Mountain Lodge, ranging from 20-minute strolls to an eight-hour trek to the summit of Cradle Mountain. With lodge-based activities, including horse riding, mountain biking, fly fishing, canoeing, 4WD tours and tobogganing, boredom is not an option. From the lodge, it’s a two-hour, winding drive to the seaside village of Strahan on Tasmania’s west coast, nestled on the huge expanse of Macquarie Harbour, a 290sqkm body of water fed by the Franklin and Gordon Rivers.
It’s picture-book pretty, with a waterfront dominated by a village-style tourist complex offering accommodation from 19th century-style workers’ cottages to terrace apartments, hotel and motel rooms and backpacker lodgings. Regular drenching rain falling on the massive stands of forest in the Wild Rivers National Park flushes into the harbour, carrying with it timber oils and tannins which stain the sea brown. Wave action works the natural detergents into wind-driven slicks of foam which stretch for kilometres.
A 55 nautical mile (110km) cruise on Macquarie Harbour includes a run out to Hell’s Gate, the narrow entrance that separates the harbour from the brooding Southern Ocean. The next landfall is the tip of South America, 8000 nautical miles to the west. A reminder of the ocean’s unbridled strength, the story is told of a nautical buoy which disappeared 14km off the coast after recording its last wave measurement, an electronic epitaph which indicated the buoy was on the crest of a 23.5m-high wave, up to nine stories high.
Returning to the safety of the harbour, the boat heads 6km up the Gordon River to Heritage Landing, the resting place of a tired giant. It’s here, where the walls of timber climbing up the sides of the river valley are raked by the 40 to 60-knot gale winds of the Roaring Forties, that the convicts from the first penal settlement in Van Diemen’s Land, on nearby Sarah Island, dragged the giant bodies of old-man trees into the water for transport. Huon pine was prized by the shipwrights of the early 1800s because of its strength and resistance to marine borers. The oil from the golden, rich timber, methyl eugenol, is a natural preservative, an elixir of life.
At the end of a boardwalk, like some massive crumpled dinosaur, a 2000-year-old Huon pine has fallen, but is not dead. The pine, which had been growing since the birth of Christ, fell to its knees on November 26, 1997. The rest of the tree crashed to the ground three years later. It won’t begin to rot until the 23rd or 24th century.
In the west coast wilderness in the late 1800s, the old-man Huon was enjoying its twilight years as the world of men won wealth from the ground and built ways to transport it over mountains to the coast. The 34km-long Abt Railway from Queenstown to Strahan, less than an hours’ drive away by car, was built by the Mt Lyell Mining Company in 1896 to haul copper over steep ridges using a rack and pinion system (a toothed central third track) developed by Swiss inventor, Dr. Roman Abt. It was cutting-edge technology of the time and gave the nuggety steam locomotives the traction they needed to cope with the steep gradients. The railway closed 67 years later when the operation became unviable and restoration of the Wilderness Railway did not begin in earnest until January, 2000.
Nearly three years and $25 million later, the rhythmic thud and hiss of the steam engine again echoes in the valleys as it clambers its way up the Rinadeena Saddle, hauling glass-roofed carriages fitted out in blackwood, sassafras, celery top pine, Tasmanian oak and myrtle.
At Rinadeena Station, there is a dazzling gemstone collection in a mock mine. Displayed under ultra-violet light, blue/green apatite from the Rossarden Tin Mine on the east coast glows a beautiful rich fluorescent gold just the kind of magical mineral a dwarf might pry from a rock wall in the Mines of Moria.
Continued from: Lord Of The Swings, Cradle Mountain: Part 1
Photo Credits
Macquarie Harbour – Wikimedia Public Domain
Hell’s Gate – Wikimedia Creative Commons
ABT Railway Opening Queenstown Tasmania – Source – FortyDegreesSouth
ABT Railway Station – By Vincent Ross – All Rights Reserved
ABT Railway Tasmania – Source – Terranova Tours
Apatite – Wikimedia Public Domain
Thumbnail – ABT Railway – Tasmania – Source – Australasian Mining History Association
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