Day 15: 7 March 2010 Saved by the weather

Chris had invited us to join his bushwalking group for a “Four Peaks” walk in the Mt Cameron ranges in the northeast. We agreed in advance with some trepidation, but nearly bailed out on hearing the fine detail of the planned walk: a strenuous ascent of four steepish, rarely visited peaks over a full day, but the views were to be fabulous. Chris is a lean individual who does chin ups on his fruit tree branches, and when travelling overseas, as he frequently does with work, keeps fit with his regular hour of exercise in the back of the Jumbo. David and I were still slightly stiff from our efforts at Lake St Clair, but we egged eachother on, and found ourselves in Chris's car, hurtling towards Mt Cameron, early on Sunday morning. Getting out of the car was a bad moment, not the least because Chris had driven through a smelly old wallaby corpse on the road and a good part of it still adhered to the underside of the car. We headed up the first ascent at a clipping pace. But fortunately, the weather then began to close in, fog enshrouded all four peaks, blotted out the fabulous views and no doubt saved David and me from cardiac arrest because the peaks were abandoned in favour of a much easier goal – Cube Rock. This was reached and photographed and returned from, all in time to do some other things in the afternoon. A lucky escape if you ask me.

Chris took us to Weldborough first, where there is a great old pub dripping with local history from the times when most of the local tin miners were Chinese. Their joss house is now in the Launceston museum. We explored the Myrtle walk and drove through fern lined mountain roads on the way to Pyengana valley, where there was a fifth generation cheese factory selling potent little cheddars. Out the back, the Fresians were milling about, waiting to be milked, while the fifth generation farmer himself called at them to move on up, move on up. Then to pretty St Columba Falls, 90 metres of pure Tasmanian mountain water plummeting into a pond in an amphitheatre of tree ferns. Returned to Scottsdale via Sandra's childhood home in Legerwood, or rather, the bare block where her family's home once stood. Hard to believe that bushfire comes to these green places, but apparently, it does. Legerwood is also home to a fascinating memorial to WW1 soldiers from the town who were lost in the great war. Chainsawed out of huge trees in the main street by one Eddie Freeman, the wooden sculptures depict the men in their short lives before the war.

That night we drank a lot, ate wonderful home cooked food, and dragged out the vinyls. We ended up singing like hound dogs, great songs from the sixties.