24 hours after planning began, I was in a police boat trying to hold my pack down as we sped along the water, bouncing in the wake of their FRV. With me were two Tasmanian Police and a member of the Uni bushwalking club, preparing to be dropped off in the wilderness with my sister and a caver.
We were dropped on the shore of Lake St Clair, where we checked our packs and set off. Of the fourteen Search And Rescue teams in the area, our objective seemed like one of the simplest. We had to follow a track over Mt Olympus, making two-hourly scheduled check-ins with exercise base to test the coverage of two different SES radio systems and standard mobile phones. We would rendezvous with another team's camp at Lake Petrarch, and walk out to Cynthia bay by 2pm the next day.
Quarter of an hour on good track brought us to the track turnoff, though we'd never have known that's what it was if Hannah hadn't done the walk before. It was a couple of scuff marks, nothing more.
We set off uphill through rainforest, still bereft of any kind of track. Ever walked in rainforest without a track? It looks open and easy, but half the ground slips out from underfoot and any branch used as a handhold is likely nothing more than pulp held together with moss. Add in a 45° incline and it was pretty hard going. Half and hour in, we hit a cliff straight across the hillside. Just six metres of vertical rock covered in dripping moss. Here we found the first signs of a track, an length of pink tape wrapped around a branch at the clifftop, above a route that afforded a few sturdy protruding roots as convenient handholds.
Hannah and I were on this team because of snow experience. Yes, we had both done a bit of climbing, but that hadn't been mentioned in our brief... This ascent was easy, but it wasn't to be the last.
The track vanished immediately beyond the pink tape and we set off blind again. Similar cliffs reared up several times, some with tape-marked easy ascents and some without. By the time we reached the flats up top, the afternoon was half-gone. Snow, bog, thick scrub and no sign of a trail had it past 4pm when we hit Lake Oenone. We had a choice: camp there in the snow and leave at 6am to try and get out in the morning, or press on over the saddle to the Cuvier Valley Track and our planned rendezvous. Our map showed a track down from the saddle into the valley...
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| Stay or go? |
That was the theory anyway, which might have worked if it hadn't taken an hour and a half to bash our way through thick scrub, scramble over snow-covered boulder fields and traverse near-vertical slopes by hanging onto the vegetation. We had an hour at most to find a campsite, and the saddle was bereft of a flat space large enough for a stove, let alone tents to hold six people. The other side was a vast boulder-field ending in dense scrub, similarly bereft of campsites, cairns or any signs of a track. There was no choice though, so we set off.
Half an hour later, we struck gold: a tiny pocket in the boulder-field, filled with snow enough to create space for our tents. By then we were soaked through, our outer layers frozen and our feet gone numb. We pitched our tents, ate our meals, donned every bit of dry clothing we had and bedded down for the night.
Dawn happened somewhere, though the mountain and snow-clouds in the way made this seem unlikely at the time. I can safely say that it was the coldest night I'd ever spent in a tent, and our tent nearly collapsed beneath the weight of fresh snow piled onto it. We couldn't see more than five metres when we packed and set off, and it was from the layout of tents that we knew which was was downhill.
Visibility cleared quickly though, and we left the boulders, found ways to bypass the scrub, passed through a band of sparse eucalypts, pushed through a band of some unidentified snow-covered trees which bent easily out of the way and finally hit a wall of tea-tree. It extended down the lower half of the mountainside and was broken only by enormous fallen eucalypt logs, too tall or slick with sleet for us to cross. The day wore on as we wore down, and finally brought us to the flat valley floor. We had four hours to walk the 9 km out to the exercise base when we stumbled on the track.
It was a slight depression in the ground, either an animal pad or a creek, but we followed it because it was going the right way. A flapping piece of yellow tape gave us courage and we set a blistering (quite literally, given how wet our boots were) pace. Every few minutes we would come across another piece of tape, which was fortunate because otherwise we'd have had no idea that we were still on the track. The pad we first stumbled on was the most distinct patch of track we uncovered. When we discovered a marker, it was generally by chance, buried amid tea-tree with no path (obvious or otherwise) leading on from it.
Our pace slowed to a crawl, trying not to lose our way or each other in the dense vegetation, sinking into knee and waste-deep pools that opened deceptively beneath screens of low grass in every clearing. We weren't going to make it in the few hours we had left before debrief. We wouldn't even make it before nightfall. A general despair started to set it.
Then, in one clearing, a ray of hope made it through to us from a relay tower. We had spent the last half-day in a communications blackspot, with no way of calling out, but now a window opened for long enough to let a text message through. Debrief had been brought forward by two hours due to inclement weather. Could we make it back by then? If not, extraction was on offer. All we had to do was find open ground...
Never had we been more energised, taking off for a stretch of buttongrass we had glimpsed rising on the horizon beyond the next river crossing.
Good communication now possible, we sent out a GPS grid-reference and settled in to wait. A few minutes later, a speck on the horizon resolved into the exercise's helicopter. A brief flight over the kilometres of untracked swamp, pickup in a police cruiser and we were back at exercise base just in time for debrief.
We were soaked to the skin, cold and elated. Chopper rides will do that for you.
As weekends of preparation go, the first one wasn't too bad...
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