Day 15 – Divide Creek to Richmond Crag

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I wake with a mixture of emotions. Trepidation, intimidation, determination… awe.

I have one task today. Walk. The weather is perfect. I still have three beautiful days ahead, and the 40mm of rain has been pushed back to Wednesday and downgraded to 4mm. Barely enough to get the Gordon to rise. I’ll walk, assess as I go, and find a good place to camp for the night. It’s just 40km to Rhona.

I fight my way at less than a kilometre an hour following the creek down to where Becca’s track heads up the spur. Becca is a veteran of Tassie off-track, and I have faith that although hard, she would have picked a better route than I could.

Going three steps without a fight is a joy. A scrap of button grass is exquisite.

And then I break out of the scrub and see mist on Lake King William.

Feeding the same power station that Lake St Clair no longer does, Lake King William is 15km long and holds a paltry 6 million litres. Nothing is known about it. 

I reach Becca’s track and start heading uphill, and immediately the scrub is more manageable. Lesson: I have no idea how to pick a path in this terrain. Luckily, I have a wiser path to follow now. It won’t be easy, but I feel like I’ve got a hand holding mine.

I take a break and check the map. It’s 800 horizontal and 450 vertical meters to the peak. On trail, that might take me an hour, hour and a half. I’ll be lucky to be up there by early afternoon. But every step is progress.

There is detritus in every nook and cranny. I have to carabiner my hip pockets to keep them from catching on branches and coming open. Half the trees I grab for support come away in my hand, rotten. A log turns to slime beneath my boot. I watch the distance to the peak decrease by infinitesimal degrees.

I feel like I occasionally see evidence of Becca’s party; a trampled path, a broken branch. I am gaining an immense respect for Tasmanian bushwalkers. I am averaging 200m an hour. I move carefully and with intention. Each step is planned, fought, and won.

Finally I emerge onto a rock fall, and can see the top, or at least something near the top.

The final ascent is a precarious scramble. Two fist fulls of foliage; good foot hold; haul. Repeat.

My speed for the day has been 300m/hour. I really hope it gets easier from here.

Well, that’s done. Now I’ll just walk until I either find a good campsite, or run out of daylight and find a shitty one. Pretty sure I’m above the treeline tonight.

I’m babying my right knee which I smacked on a rock yesterday. It hurts when I raise and lower myself on it, which I’m doing a lot of. I hope I’m not making it worse by walking on it.

I again stack it on the loose rocks over from Slatters, and despite falling on my pack out of instinct, still take more skin off my forearm. Also off my thigh. This is beginning to lose a little of its romantic appeal.

A copperhead glides noiselessly under a rock.

Around Lake Anne the walking is blissfully open and flat, on grasses and moss, weaving amongst alpine tarns big and small. I have a much needed wash.

There are scraps of foot pad through here. Or maybe they’re wombat trails. Somebody with an oblong anus has definitely been shitting on it.

My knee feels quite a bit better now that I’m not doing the equivalent of endless one-legged squats with a 15kg dumbbell. I make it up King William II.

The day is getting old. I have to find somewhere to camp for the night.

I keep walking to a tarn near Richmond Crag. There are still hours of daylight left, and I haven’t gone nearly as far as I’d hoped, but I’m tired and there’s no guarantee of a decent site over the next peak. It takes me half an hour to find a spot and get the hammock up. Hanging from rocks is always a pain in the arse. But I need a comfortable night’s sleep to recover from this foolishness.

I don’t know how the fuck to feel about the rest of this after yesterday’s post where I shared my helicopter story. I was toughing it out, finding my strength. I’d done an incredible bit of walking today. My knee had been a bit of a pain, but I was about to put a compression bandage on it and rest it for the night. Things were going hard, but going well.

I sat down in my hammock. I felt it drop suddenly, a beat, then it was like somebody had sucker punched me in the side of the head. I looked down and blood was pissing from somewhere. Presumably me. I stumbled out of the hammock. My glasses were gone. There was a hole in my tarp. The only conclusion was that the hammock rigging had slung a loose and sizeable plate of rock off, which had sailed through the air, through my tarp, and avenged itself on my temple. A one in a million shot. I looked at myself in selfie mode and could see a gaping laceration. I slapped an oversized bandaid over it and called Garry. We talked things through. He helped me get over my reticence to push the button.

I pushed the button.

I didn’t really need to actually push the button, on account of inexplicably having one bar of 4G right where I was camped. The nice man at Garmin took my details and suggested I also call 000. The nice man at the Tasmanian ambulance service had a chat with me and said he’d call me back.

I can’t believe, with all the hazards I’ve negotiated, deftly sidestepped or fleshily absorbed over the last two days, it’s a freak hammocking accident that gets me.

I started layering up to mitigate the effect of shock, and against the mild oncoming evening wind. Pretty good chance I’d be bunking down until morning.

They called back. Helicopter en route. 30 min. I told him I was next to two tarns, with a nice big flat spot. The ambulance bloke said I might not believe it, but he’s stood in the exact same place before. I shoved everything into my pack in one big bundle, and waited.

I saw the red light coming from way over the mountains. When it got closer, I put my head lamp on “thousand suns, battery dead in ten minutes” mode so they could see me, and waited.

The helicopter was like a hurricane, turning the water of the two small tarns into a fine mist. The gnarly alpine vegetation took it in stride. It’s used to crazy winds.

Behind me, presumably, the silence flowed back in like the tide.