Giant Trees

After chatting a bit more to Don and Claire, and looking at Claire's photos of birds, we packed up again (we have definitely got too much stuff) while it threatened to rain, and headed off east towards Pemberton.

Pemberton and the surrounding towns grew out of the logging industry.  This part of Western Australia is full of huge tree forests.  70 metre tall Karri trees that they used to cut down by hand and drag to the railway lines with bullock teams, carry to the coast, and ship over seas.  there were photos in the little historical museum at the Pemberton Visitor Information centre, showing men in singlet, boots and trousers, climbing up these giant trees using just a rope around their middle and metal spikes in the side of the trees, then swinging an axe while standing on spikes at the top, so they could 'top' the tree (chop off the upper part with all the branches).  Once that fell, they had to quickly duck and hang on for dear life, as the trunk of the tree would sway from side to side for a few minutes.  Boy it looked scary.

They are enormous, these trees, and the thing with forests as we saw yesterday, is the risk of fire.  Either from human error, or lightning strike.  In order to stop any fires quickly they set up a system of lookouts who could quickly pinpoint the location of a fire and send people to the right spot to put it out.  The thing is, these lookouts had to be pretty tall to see over the tall trees, so they built them on top of the trees themselves.  60metres up.  For a while they went out of 'fashion' and planes took over the fire spotting role, but then people realized that planes could not be in the air all the time and in all weathers, so the trees were used again.

  There are still a few you can climb today.  the Gloucester tree, just outside of Pemberton, was named for the then Governor General of Australia, who was visiting at the time in the 1930s when it was being constructed.  It is 65m above the ground and is reached by very steep spikes in the side of the tree.  At least 200,000 people climb this tree each year.  They check the spikes regularly, but climbing things is really not my thing.  Grant, Katie, Joseph and Dominic did it though.  We had to hold Cooper down, or he would have been up it too.  Nadine and Oskar wanted to climb as well, but mummy wasn't up to it!

A lady used to have the job of fire spotter, and would climb up every day to keep a look out of fires.  She wrote it was a bit boring, but she enjoyed the peace and quiet. 

This was actually the second tree we'd climbed today.  The first was the Dave Evans Bicentennial Tree.  This one was only constructed in 1988 as part of the Bicentennial of Australia celebrations, but is the taller of the two.  At 75m high, it was incredibly scary to watch Grant, Katie and Joseph go to the top.  They said it was scary to climb, too.  Dominic got to the first platform, 25 m, and decided it was a bit too scary.  The smaller three wanted to do this one too, but I wouldn't let them! 

In big winds you shouldn't climb, or in wet weather.  It was a bit wet today, which added to the thrill of the whole event.  But it did stop raining for each climb.

By the end I was exhausted.  The stress from watching the ones who climbed up, and the stress from the whining and crying of the ones that didn't.  But it was a lovely day. 

We stopped at Shannon National Park, which was a lovely place, full of trees and lots of orange leaves on the ground.  They had a wood fired shower that some of us used, and we were allowed to light a fire to cook our dinner.  The lighting part actually turned out to be quite difficult, we seemed to have fire retardant wood, and it was only the kindness of our neighbor who gave us some fire starters that meant we got any dinner!  Fire starters on the shopping list.

More rain tonight.  Very wet.

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Vicki