National Park vs State Forest(56K dangerdanger)

[tim31]

So we've done a few day trips to nearby forests to get out of the city and get some pure, uncut air. Tasmania has the highest proportion of its area given over to national parks and world heritage areas. Three weekends ago we visited Mount Field National Park, about an hour northwest of Hobart.



This is on the walk in to Russell Falls. Your minds eye sees dinosaurs amongst this.



Russell Falls, or as much as I could get from the platform below.



Gangeroo

If you drive up into the hills, there are skiing fields. It's almost summer here, and yet:



Snow! Snow, in the same sector!



This is Lake Dobson, one of the smaller bodies that feed Russell Falls. Like most of the freshwater lakes in central Tasmania, it was probably dumped by a glacier. We walked a track that runs the circumference of the lake, and then the sun was going down; time to go home.

This weekend past we headed the opposite direction. 90 minutes south of Hobart, the local logging authority, Forestry Tasmania, has set up a nice propoganda piece. One of those gantries that allows you to walk at treetop level and take in the sights.



This is a cantilevered section that offers some grand views:



The confluence of the Picton(left) and the Huon(right) rivers. The Huon is a lovely river that sadly, and inevitably, runs through Huonville.



My daughter didn't like the motion out on the cantilever, and I was exacerbating the problem. So we made our way off(it's a one-way path through the treetops, except for the spur of the canitlever). Down below, at the riverside, there is a track that takes you upstream to beyond the fork, and it was here we crossed:



Again, Charlotte didn't like the motion of the bridge, and I wasn't helping with my yelling "Mola Ram! Prepare to meet Kali!" But she made it. And then we had to cross another one

And so we wandered back down the other bank, to the visitor's centre. Another view of the Huon:



And another:



Note the chunk of tree wedged more than four metres above the waterline. How do you suppose that got there? HINT: I have a friend who white-water rafts down here.

Two Saturdays well spent!

[Havok]

Snow! Snow, in the same sector!

NERD!!!

Then again... I got the reference didn't I?

You have a great looking family man.

How come there weren't a million, poisonous, giant, mutant critters in all your pictures trying to eat you guys? It is AU right?

[The Grim Squeaker]

Looks like a beautiful place, especially the bridge and the falls . It looks amazingly like the West coast of the US (apart from the first picture), are you sure you didn't visit Washington state rather than Australia/Tanzania?

Also, all of your landscape shots are overexposed by about a third of a stop. (too bright/light, causing details and colour to be lost and too much burnt out white) / photo geek.
That bridge shot is awesome, try climbing onto it and shooting from it's underside, what's the worst that can happen

[tim31]

Thanks Hav! And it was dangerous fauna's day off. They only work weekends during the tourist high seasons.

And Dan, the biggest problem is that all these shots were taken with a Pentax Optio point-n-shoot, originally bought for the virtue of working underwater. I really want an SLR, but the lady seen in the pictures above declares in a waste of money when we have a perfectly good camera(sigh). A friend of mine was selling his eighteen month old 5D for a good price, but someone else got it first

[The_Saint]

I've rafted the picton when the water level was such that we had to pull the rafts out and go over the bridge because the water level was too high to get under... at that height the water moves so fast that it took us under an hour to do a 3.5 hour trip... started the day without a cloud in the sky and when we pulled the rafts out it was snowing. I'm not too happy about the awesome campsite they destroyed by putting a "visitor centre" on top of it and then banning all easy access local camping though.

Nice shots of M Field always like reminders that we live in paradise down here...

[The Duchess of Zeon]

If you're curious, Tim, DEATH, Tasmania is actually in a very similar climatic band to Washington State, so there's good reason for the similarity. We actually have a huge number of ferns up here too--they do really well in the climate here and can literally carpet the floor of the forest beneath the canopy as far as the eye can see--but sadly we have no evolutionary remnant fern trees. If we did, they'd be everywhere.

[tim31]

Yeah, I'd noticed more than a few similarities in the pics from your and Amy's excursion up the coast earlier this year. Washington is slightly further north than Tassie is south(Hobart is at 42 degrees), but being a small island sitting in the path of the so-called roaring forties gave it generous rainfall that mainland Australia, excepting small areas along the coastline, could only dream about. For this same reason we are almost entirely on hydro-electric power(there is a cable to the mainland, but we sell more energy to them than we receive).