TUESDAY 7TH MARCH - BEN'S ANNIVERSARY

Incredible day today. The engineers would find it incredibly interesting and the environmentalists would find it incredibly disappointing. We drove from the Mount Field National Park where we are camped to the very large Southwest National Park which contains the vast Lakes Pedder and Gordon. The vast areas they cover was, until the 1970's, pristine wilderness.

Presumably, what we now see downstream of the dam walls is what was formerly seen on the upstream side of them as well.

 

We visited:-

 

Gordon Dam

Serpentine Dam

Scott's Peak Dam

Edgar Dam

At the Gordon Dam, adventurous people were descending by rope from the top of the dam wall to the valley floor 140 metres below on the downstream side of the dam. They are welcome to it. You can just make out the person in the lower middle of the picture above.

At Steve's suggestion, we visited an absolute gem being the Styx Tall Tree Reserve. It is very difficult for a photograph to do justice to a tree which is 400 years old and 87 metres in height. The reserve is an area excluded from logging where the giant trees remain undisturbed, other than by the forces of nature. There were some very large ones laying on the ground.

Tomorrow we will be exploring the alpine section of Mount Field and then heading a little further north to Lake St. Clair.