Myrtle Mysteries

South from Yolla the road dropped into Hellyer Gorge, and the forest closed over it like a lid. The free camp sat deep in the canopy, shaded and cool, and within minutes of parking we understood both the appeal and the problem. The trees were too dense for solar. The panels, which had kept the batteries healthy since Queensland, could not find enough light to hold a charge. Worse, the canopy killed the Starlink signal entirely, which meant no work, no contact, and for a couple who still relied on an online business to function, no second night.

The march flies made the argument redundant. They arrived in numbers the moment we stepped outside, large and persistent and unimpressed by waving arms. The bus screens held them off, but the screens also meant staying inside, and staying inside a bus that was not charging in a forest that was not connecting felt like the wrong kind of stillness. One night. We agreed on it quickly.

What the gorge lacked in practicality it made up for on foot. The River Track followed the Hellyer River downstream, an easy walk through tall forest along the banks, well-maintained and clearly popular. We walked it and enjoyed it, but it was the second track that earned the stop. Anth had been following a geocache on his phone, and the coordinates led off the main path toward a walk that was not signposted from the car park: the Old Myrtle Forest Walk, tucked behind the tree line, its entrance easy to miss if you were not looking for something specific.

The myrtle beeches inside were old in a way that made the word feel insufficient. Their trunks were thick and dark, wrapped in moss so deep it looked like a second skin, and the forest floor beneath them was soft and damp and quiet in a way that had nothing to do with absence of sound and everything to do with the sound being very old. We walked slowly without deciding to, speaking less as we went deeper in, and the feeling the place carried was not mystery or magic but simply age: the patient, unhurried accumulation of centuries in a grove that almost no one visits.

Anth found the geocache. Sal waited on a fallen trunk, looking up. They walked back out to the bus and the march flies and the flat batteries, and left the next morning without regret but also without dismissing the place. Hellyer Gorge had given them one good thing, and the one good thing had been hidden behind the obvious path, found by accident, reached through a hobby. It was becoming a pattern.Read more