From Alpine Peaks to Forest Deep

From Ben Lomond we dropped back through the park entrance, stopped to refill the water tank at the old campsite, and treated ourselves to coffee and pie at a stop on the road toward the coast. Pie and coffee on the road was a rarity, the kind of small indulgence that felt larger for how seldom we allowed it.

Mark and Stacey at Ben Lomond had mentioned Evercreech Forest Reserve, and the way they had spoken about it suggested we should not drive past. It sat halfway between the highlands and the coast, down a dirt road that led into dense forest, and the shift from the open alpine plateau to closed canopy was abrupt enough to feel like entering a different park. A tiger snake crossed the track on the way in, the second of the trip, fast and purposeful and gone before alarm could turn into anything more than a sharp intake of breath.

The campsite was nearly empty. One other couple, travelling in a truck with the unhurried look of people who had been at this for a while, were set up across the clearing. We parked, introduced ourselves, and by evening were sitting around a shared fire trading the stories that campfire light seems to draw out of people who would not tell them in daylight. The cloud cover that had followed us down from the highlands stayed, which meant the solar panels gave us very little, but we managed a wash cycle during a brief break in the grey and counted it as a win.

The walk the next day was the reason the English couple had sent us here. The track ran through rainforest to a waterfall that dropped over mossy rock into a pool below, the kind of falls that looks smaller than it sounds. But it was what stood above the falls that stopped us. The White Knights: the tallest white gums on earth, rising out of the forest floor with trunks so pale and straight they looked less like trees and more like columns built to hold something up that was no longer there. We stood among them with our necks craned back and the canopy impossibly high above us, and the scale of them made the dolerite at Ben Lomond feel like a different kind of grandeur. The rock had been ancient and hard. The trees were ancient and alive, still growing, still reaching, and the quiet around their base had the quality of a place that knows exactly what it is and does not need visitors to confirm it.Read more