Date: Fri 15-May-1998

Publication: Bee

Author: CURT

Quick Words:

Jeff-White-Overland-Australia

Full Text:

Tasmanian Epic: Hiking Australia's Overland Track

By Jeff White

I should have heeded the omen.

During the one-hour van ride from Launceston to the base of Cradle Mountain, I

witnessed sunshine, sleet, snow, with two brief torrents of rain mixed in for

good measure.

This is typical Tasmanian weather, the van driver said, content that he wasn't

venturing beyond the warm sanctuary of his vehicle. If you don't like the

weather, wait a minute -- it'll change.

The air was crisp and cold against my face as I got out of the van. I spent a

few minutes running a final check on my gear, then shouldered my pack and

headed for the sign posted Overland Track.

The Overland track is to Australian bushwalking what the Appalachian Trail is

to American hiking. The trail meanders 50 miles through the heart of the

Tasmanian highlands, linking Cradle Mountain in the north to Lake St. Claire

in the south.

Today, it is the focal point of Tasmania's World Heritage Area, a staggering

area of land comprising the majority of central and western Tasmania. I had

come to hike the track in its entirety. Along the way I hoped to gain some

perspective on the environmental effects of the popularity of Australia's best

bushwalk. I had enough food and gear with me for 10 days on the track. Most

people take between five and eight days to complete the walk.

The volatile weather I had witnessed during my bus approach took a wintry turn

as I took my first burdened steps underneath a 50-pound pack. As I made my way

across the valley, leading towards the approach to Cradle Mountain, I looked

up to see clouds spilling over the stone apex like a thick, white soup.

Melville's words came to mind: Shadows present, foreshadowing deeper shadows

to come.

A ranger, making his was down the trail, stopped to inform me that I was

heading into trouble. As he put it, I was steering right into an epic. The

wind started as a cold, but soft, caress as I continued across the buttongrass

fields.

I met Dan, a student from the University of Pennsylvania, a few yards up the

track. He was standing there, quite literally, in his underwear. The ranger

had told him to take off the blue jeans he was wearing - they were sure to

freeze when saturated. Cotton kills, the old saying goes. The ranger thought

Dan would be far better off hiking in his thermal underwear. We agreed to team

up, as the soft caress turned harsh. It was clearly snowing along the upper

plateaus which flank Cradle's pinnacle. We started our slow ascent through an

increasingly unforgiving wind, as the first flakes fell on my parka.

Austrian immigrant Gustav Weindorfer first laid eyes on the Cradle Valley in

1909. The terrain which he saw, characterized by rugged granite spires, deep

forests and flat, buttongrass valleys reminded him so much of his native

Austria that a year later, he settled permanently in the region. In 1922,

thanks largely to Weindorfer's campaigning, Cradle Mountain-Lake St. Claire

was named a national park. Eight years later, the first walkers blazed the

Overland Track.

I led most of the climb, with Dan close behind, forming a natural shield from

the wind, which blew uphill. The going was, to say the least, slow. The slope

was narrow, steep, and exposed. Our cautious steps exacerbated by a crosswind,

which all but blew us off the ridge.

But we did have the mountain's slope as a natural protection against Mother

Nature's breath. It was only in certain sections where the wind proved a cold

punch in the face. My concern was the plateau we were heading towards, where

the snow piled up, and where nothing would thwart the gusts.

Amazing Wilderness

The five miles along the alpine plateau, which made up the ridge that circled

high above Cradle Lake, proved the slowest going. Dan and I had walked into a

full blizzard, with the wind buckling our knees, and the hard snow stinging

our faces. I felt as if I was in a room with four white walls, yet these walls

stretched infinitely. The trail offered no consistency, at one point I'd be

shin-deep in snow, then ankle-deep in water, then shin-deep in mud.

Yet the wilderness we struggled through was amazing. Scrubby, dwarfed bushes,

not much wider than a tire and blanketed in white, dotted the landscape. There

were small alpine lakes, which contained natural boulder bridges. Even thin

creeks meandered across the flat track. When the fog would temporarily lift,

Cradle Mountain became visible, with its dolerite scree slops spilling down

into the valley far below.

But the fog would only ebb temporarily. The surroundings proved an inadequate

distraction to the fact that Dan and I moved deeper into the storm.

"I can't feel my hands," he shouted over the gales.

We pushed on, and came upon a small hut used for a lunch site and an emergency

shelter. This gave Dan an opportunity to revive his frozen hands, and me the

chance to survey our realistic chances of making our sleeping hut before dark.

"I think we can make it," I said, trying to sound confident. The truth was

that I had no idea how far we had left.

Dan got warm. I ate a little. We both rested, then marched on. The good aspect

of the endeavor was that the storm did not intensify; it was just constantly

bad. We slogged through creek beds, thick mud, snow. My feet got increasingly

colder. I got colder. I longed for the warmth and comfort of a down comforter

and polar fleece blanket. My stomach turned with the idea of a desperate

bivouac out on this plain, shivering in a tent all night.

But the frame of the Waterfall Valley hut snapped me away from contemplating

the worst. We had made it, eight miles in just under eight hours. We stormed

through the door to find twenty other souls sitting around, eating and

laughing, totally oblivious to the suffering Dan and I had endured.

Impact On The Track

I met Steve while I gulped down hot noodles and tuna. A native of Hobart,

Tasmania's capital city. He and his partners were on their way off the trail,

after a two-day push towards the next hut down the track.

He sighted a disturbing combination as their reason for an early exit:

continuing severe weather and a highly overcrowded track. What made this

combination so dire, according to Steve, was that the trail teemed with

students, on Easter break, who weren't prepared for the rigors of an eight-day

hike. Especially an eight-day hike in these harsh elements.

"The problem with all these students," Steve pointed out, knowing he was

talking with one of them, "is that they come expecting an easy walk with fine

weather. Most of them are using garbage bags for rain jackets! When the

weather turns bad, they huddle up inside the huts, overcrowding them -- or

worse, they push on, and endanger themselves."

I asked if the influx of a large number of recreational hikers had any adverse

impacts on the environment.

"The impact comes when hikers don't stay on the sign-posted trail, when they

leave garbage behind, when they camp on non-campsites, when they feed the

animals," he said.

"All of this affects the environment, yet it isn't specific to the expert or

the novice. Everyone does his or her part to impact the track, some

beneficially, other not."

I thought about Steve's words as I lay, well fed and warm, in my sleeping bag.

There shouldn't have to be experience requirements to hike a trail like this,

I thought. Just, perhaps, an intelligence requirement. One needed to be smart,

to know one's capabilities and limitations, and to do one's best not to impact

the environment.

The storm blew vociferously outside, like an animal scratching at the outside

of our hut, trying to get in. A man next to me snored with equal vigor. I fell

asleep wondering which sounded more threatening.

The storm had abated some as I awoke early next morning. I had decided the

night before that I would accompany Steve and his mates back up the trail I

hiked down yesterday, out of the park. I stood outside, watching clouds spill

down the ridges high above. The going would continue to be rough, but we had a

window.

Dan decided to push on down the trail. He had no time constraints, tons of

food, and no where else to go. I wished him luck, donned my pack, and followed

Steve, Greg and Ian out the door and back to Cradle Mountain.

The winds diminished and the visibility improved. Temperatures were sill

frigid, but I actually started to feel the warmth of hard work, with sweat

like a layer of frost on my back. This was only a lull, though, as a ranger

back at the hut told me. More fierce weather was due the next day.

Steve, Greg, Ian and I encountered parties of enthusiastic hikers marching up

the slopes. Some looked like experienced hikers, but most didn't. There were

even a few pairs of tennis shoes and garbage bags. None knew the state of the

track that we were coming from. None knew what we knew, about the weather. We

did our best to pass information along.

We descended towards the beginning of the track via a shorter route, one that

would dump us into a car park, where we hoped a bus would be waiting for us.

The sun broke through, and a faint rainbow formed in front of temporarily

exposed Cradle Mountain. The first picture-worthy scene of the hike, and my

camera was buried in my pack.

Four days later I sat in an Irish pub in Hobart, and thought about my aborted

attempt on the Overland Track. I felt vexed; the weather, it seemed, had

gotten the best of me. But it was an adventure all the same, I reasoned,

whether I completed the track or not. I also had regrets. I wished I had

dissuaded those ill prepared hikers from continuing, knowing what could be

waiting for them down the track.

I finished my beer.

I wished I had gotten a picture of that rainbow.

(Editor's note: Jeff White, of Willowbrook Lane, Newtown, is currently

enrolled at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, where he is

participating in a semester of study abroad. His home university is Boston

College, where he is a junior studying political science with the hope of

becoming a journalist.)