Another day, another billion contours

Saturday, 1 January 2022

On our way home to Hobart we stopped to do the hike up to The Needles, starting from the highest point of the Gordon River Road. The route is missing from brochures, and unsignposted from the road, but it's a taped and cairned route to the top of pointy jagged rocks that loom high above the car park below.  

Once again it was straight up from the start through the twisted remains of the shrub that was burnt in fires of late 2018.

In fact the signs of the fire were visible from the very bottom all the way to the top - twisted and burnt bushes were just metres from the trig point. It's sad but the area was definitely recovering and the lack of low scrub seemed to be giving the opportunity to a huge range of flowers this year - popping out of the ground to create flowery meadows as we got closer to the top. Unlike yesterday's hike we had views all the way up.

 It took about an hour to get to the top.

We crossed paths with a few people along the way - (certainly more than yesterday when we saw absolutely no-one and the log book showed that Mt Wedge got about 1 hiking group every 2 days).  Impressive given it seems to be a word-of-mouth (or word-of-blog) hike. 

On our way home to Hobart I promised Jon he'd get to see a platypus at Westerway, and sure enough the Tyenna river did not let me down - after just a few minutes of watching while we ate our lunch a big platypus appeared and spent the next 20 minutes ducking above and below the water and zooming up and down the river bank.