Saturday 8 June 2013

Tasmania Day 5: Mt Field National Park


It was just becoming light when I woke up and when I went outside the landscape looked distinctly white. On closer inspection there was a thick frost covering everything which looked more and more beautiful as the day got lighter, and especially when the sun finally peeked over the mountains and made everything sparkle. The little pools of water were all frozen and we had a wander through the terrain finding more and more frozen pools and frost covered rocks.  Caitlin pulled a stick out of one of the ponds and it came with a chunk of ice, so she and Liam ate it as an ice block.
Frosty morning
Frozen pool










The guests in both the other huts left this morning and we were alone on the
mountain. After a morning pottering around outside and in the hut, we packed a bag with snacks and warm clothes and walked up the road to Lake Dobson. I didn’t realize that Liam hadn’t had much breakfast so he found the walk and the whole outing less fun than he normally would have. The lake was pretty and the kids played along the edge of it for a while before we did the walk around it through a Pandani Grove which was like forest I had never seen before, very ancient and mossy and gnarled. Beautiful. The sky was very overcast by this stage but the weather stayed dry.
Pandani Grove
Liam on the edge of Lake Dobson

Back at the hut we got Liam some food and the rest of us had some pumpkin soup that had been given to us by one of our departing neighbours  We had a family game of Uno – we had to move into the bedroom to play by the light coming through the window, as the window in the kitchen was south facing, with the next hut right next to it, and with the door shut it was quite dark in that room after about 2pm. Liam and Caitlin and I went back out exploring down the hill from the hut – I wanted to check out a couple of groups of trees I hadn’t made it to in the morning, and from there we found a larger pool of water with big rocks on either side. Caitlin claimed this area as her magic land.



Caitlin, Liam and I played Cheat while Millie did some dot-to-dots and colouring in and Tony cooked dinner. The kids all played a game in the bedroom and I did some crochet, when we noticed that the lantern was giving off less light than it had been – not sure whether this was because we hadn’t given it the full charging time before we got up there, or if it just wasn’t a very strong light using the rechargeable battery. Tony’s torch, shone up towards the ceiling, gave much brighter light, so he rigged that up so that we could see our games, food, and activities. Tony cooked our sausages on our camp stove outside, since the night before the smoke from cooking had filled the cabin. Several brush-tailed possums came to see if they could score some food – some of them had really dark fur which I hadn’t seen on a possum before. They weren’t scared of us at all and were quite determined to stick around to make sure they didn’t miss any scraps (we were very careful not to leave anything for them to sample) One was sitting on a ledge inside our porch with his tail hanging down and Liam was able to touch the tail – a major highlight of his trip so far.
Bennetts Wallaby outside our hut

Possums hoping for dinner

Another early night, we all went to bed in our bunks and I read a couple of chapters of Anne of Green Gables to everyone – then Millie (who had crashed even earlier than the rest of us) woke up about 10.30 and was up for a while – I stayed up with her for as long as I could manage, then set her up in my bed with a lantern and pencils and paper, and I went back to sleep, she obviously did too after a while.

No comments:

Post a Comment