Every outdoor enthusiast has a memory of that trip. The one where they understood the feeling of being properly immersed.
This was that memory. The better part of a week spent getting lost, levitating metres above the ground in tangled bauera, drinking any water graspable, and enjoying sunsets in solitude. That’s one way to put it, although I like to reflect on this trip more as a coming of age of bushwalking in Tasmania. Oskar and myself were two young guys, equally intrigued by wild places and the elusive and vast mountainous areas of Southwest Tasmania.
When you think of the way school is set out, you spend a term learning the information, then right at the end of that term they throw you in a room with a pencil and see if you have been listening. Well, the three years after finishing school was that term, the Frankland Range was that piece of paper and you guessed it … Oskar and myself were the two sticks of graphite right alongside.
We were two pencils sitting in a toasty warm car parked on the side of the road in Strathgordon, the outlook rainy, cloudy, and intimidating. There lay the daunting challenge ahead. This was a long-awaited moment, brought about through much logistical planning and learning. This place would hold all the ingredients and obstacles for challenging times, and it was all ahead of us at this point. Sounds fun, right? Let’s set the scene and break it down.
Southwest Tasmania is the bottom of the world, the end of the world, and one of the more exciting wild playgrounds on this planet. All you have to do is look at a map of Tasmania and your eyes will dart straight to this intriguing corner as if to pose a series of questions. Where are the roads? What lies down there? How