riverECHO

12,227 kilometers around Australia

We spent a week in Margaret River wine tasting at Voyager and Leeuwin Estates, riding our bikes along a couple awesome unmarked mountain biking trails, enjoying our proximity to town and drinking way too many coffees, and actually seeing some live music by the regionally well known Grace Barbe. The relaxing week seemed to fly by and in the middle of our weekend, we decided it was time to drive a little further south. We stopped at Cape Leeuwin where the Indian and Southern Oceans meet and then headed east.

The road heading inland from Margaret River runs straight into an area known as the southern forests. Huge karri trees, basically a huge type of eucalyptus, tower over the forest floor. These enormous trees are almost as tall as the famous giant redwoods in Northern California. Back in the day, fire lookouts used to shimmy up these trees with a rope and spikes on the inside of their boots. It would take them 6 hours to complete the round trip up and down. Finally they decided to build a sort of ladder made out of rebar that is drilled into the tree and spirals to the top. Each bar is about two feet above the previous bar and if you were to slip through the bars, there is nothing to catch your fall. At the top of the tree, they built a four story platform, each story connected to the next by a skinny ladder, which reaches well above the smaller branches and provides the perfect lookout to watch for fires.

So what? Well there are three of these climbing trees in the southwest that are open to the public. They are free to climb and there is no tree-lifeguard on duty to make sure you don’t fall. You just park your car and start climbing. We arrived at Dave Evans Bicentennial Tree early in the morning and had it all to ourselves. The tree is 75 meters (246 feet) tall. I don’t consider myself afraid of heights, but this thing was terrifying … in an exciting sort of way. You have to make a point to not look down and can only move one limb at a time. My hands actually hurt afterwards because I had been squeezing each bar so tightly. The view from the top was definitely worthwhile but the climb itself was the highlight, especially coming down.

Our next stop was the very small town of Northcliffe, where we had heard about a number of great mountain biking trails. We stopped by the visitor center and received a couple of “maps” of the trails from a very enthusiastic lady who had us convinced that we had come to the Moab of Australia. She pointed us in the direction of the local campground, called Round Tu-It Camp, but forgot to mention that the campground itself has actually built their own 5 km bike trail. We weren’t expecting much but it turned out to be a really fun trail and the campground will be hosting the first ever 24-hour mountain bike race in Western Australia on the same trail come January. We should have stayed at camp the following morning to ride the trail again. But instead, we took our cute mountain biking brochures and headed out to try the local trails. Our first clue should have been the access road which was covered in leaves and branches and looked to get very little use. But we were determined and proceeded to spend the next hour thrashing along a trail that was totally overgrown. To give the town credit, it could be a really cool trail if it were maintained. But while BJ kept wiping spider webs off his face and dodging tree branches, all I could think about were the snakes that were disguising themselves as sticks all along the trail.

We are now further south at a place called Walpole, along the southern coast. We are sharing a huge grassy field with a kangaroo family and some very loud kookaburras. I am really going to miss waking up to the birds when we go home.