Wombat Wishes and Dolerite Dreams

We drove further into the park toward Carr-Villa, the trailhead for the walk to Legges Tor. The dolerite appeared before we had left the car park: grey columns of it rising above the tree line, angular and blunt, the kind of rock that looks like it was broken rather than shaped. Tasmania's highlands are built on dolerite, and up here, at altitude, the stone stops hiding beneath the soil and stands exposed.

The track climbed through boulders almost immediately. Not steep in the exhausting sense, but constant, the path picking its way over lichen-covered rock that required hands as often as feet. The views opened with every gain in height, and by the first rest stop the country below had become something we could see the edges of: valleys running south, ridgelines stacked to the west, the scale of the highlands laid out in a way that walking at sea level never allows. Sal said, without much hesitation, that this was the best hike she had done. She had said similar things before, and would say them again on later walks, but in the moment she meant it completely, and the view was not arguing.

We ate salad rolls at the halfway point, sitting on a flat boulder with our legs hanging over nothing in particular, the wind steady and cool. The food tasted better than it had any right to, the way food always does when it has been carried uphill and earned.

Legges Tor is Tasmania's second-highest peak, and the summit flattened into the Alpine Plateau in a way that made arrival feel less like a climax and more like entering a different room. The vegetation dropped to ankle height, the wind had nothing left to break against, and the ground stretched away in every direction, sparse and pale and enormous. We sat near the summit marker for longer than the temperature justified, not talking about anything in particular but both thinking about the same thing: two months ago they had been packing a bus in a driveway. Now they were sitting on top of Tasmania's second-highest point, with no schedule and nowhere to be except wherever came next. The gap between those two facts was still catching up with them.

The walk down was slower than the walk up, partly because the boulders demanded care on the descent and partly because neither of us was in a hurry to leave the altitude. We watched for wombats the entire way. None appeared. Their droppings were everywhere, the distinctive cube-shaped pellets scattered across the track like evidence left deliberately to prove they existed and equally deliberately to prove they were elsewhere. The wombat drought continued.

We camped at the trailhead that night, the bus parked on flat ground with the dolerite columns still visible above the tree line in the fading light. Sleep came quickly, the kind that follows a long day on your feet, and the satisfaction of the walk settled over us like something physical, heavy and warm and entirely earned.Read more