1000th cache

This past year, and the last couple of months in particular, have been lean from a caching point of view. My steady march towards the 1000-cache milestone turned into a crawl … and even that lost momentum at times. The Christmas/New Year holiday break, however, has allowed me some time to get back out hunting, and, of course, I’m in Tassie where the scenery makes the caches a secondary bonus on top of the main prize of revisiting (and discovering) favourite places.

A few finds earlier this week got me up into the 990s (this total comes from caches registered on the two main caching websites for Australian cachers: www.geocaching.com and www.geocaching.com.au), and I had to start thinking about what I would like to do for my 1000th … and plan how to find just the right number of caches beforehand (including making allowances for “DNFs” [DNF=Did Not Find]).

On Saturday morning I was sitting on 994, and with my Hobart brother teed up to join me, we did a relatively quick blitz of some urban and not-too-far-into-the-bush caches to get me up to 999, and then we drove most of the way up Mt Wellington.

I love the open alpine plain and rocky dolerite outcrops on the top of the Mountain, and there are a few remote caches scattered around the place up here. The one we had in mind is only 1.5km from where we parked the car as the crow flies … but we had to walk, which made it somewhat further and the terrain is rougher.

We picked up a faint track that was heading in the right direction, marked with the occasional cairn, and growing more discernible as a path at times. Parts of the track were quite boggy, and so we were rock hopping as best we could to keep our feet dry and to protect the fragile alpine plants, but there were occasional slips when we had no option but to tread on the vegetation or in the mud.

The small tarns (pools) were sometimes filled with tadpoles, and there were plenty of skinks (small lizards) sunning themselves on the rocks although they were quick to get out of the way of our feet and were also rather camera shy. We were mindful of the possibility of encountering a snake (is that why my brother walked behind me?!), but we didn’t see any this time. As for the birds, there was an abundance of aural evidence for them but they were usually hard to spot.

One of the great things about the Mountain is that its 1270m summit is but a half-hour drive from the centre of Hobart — and, indeed, affords great views over the city — and yet within 5 minutes’ walk from the road you can feel as if you are in the wilderness far removed from civilisation (modulo the ever-visible television towers on the summit).

Many of the alpine wildflowers were in bloom, providing a colourful mosaic of knee-high shrubs across the big plain. There were the white skeletal remains of the snow gums burnt in the terrible 1967 bushfires, and on the edge of the plain it was pleasing to see that the trees that grew up after that event are now, at 43 years old, nearly as tall as their dead ancestors, although stunted and tortured by the winds and wintry weather that can occur up here. Although the day was mostly sunny, there was a chill to the air, an unexpected rain-front crossed, and there was a howling gale once we got up onto the ridge. It reminded us that you must treat this environment with respect and preparation.

And, of course, there was the distinctive dolerite geography that is characteristic of much of the Tasmanian mountainscape, which I so miss in Victoria: splintered columns and tumbled boulders, covered in lichens and fractured by the effects of water freezing and expanding in any crevices. Once we got up onto the ridge near the cache’s hiding place we were clambering over boulders the sizes of small cars with gaps among them big enough to hide a body or two (fortunately my brother and I get on well!).

After some careful clambering we came out onto a small peak, and my brother (aka SG-3) allowed me to do the honours of finding the cache. I spotted it, but in the process of climbing over some more rocks I suffered short term memory loss and it took me a moment or two to find it again! We signed the log book and ate our lunch in the lee of a large rock (it was so windy that we had difficulty keeping our balance for taking photographs), before making our way back to the car.

Today’s cache find was, for me, a fitting one to bring up the milestone: a great walk, with wonderful scenery and in good company. There have been many other good caching occasions on the way to this point, and I want to thank those who have hidden caches in interesting places (e.g., the “DDTs” for today’s 1000th), and those who have accompanied me on hunts to share the fun and adventure.

To mix some lines from Henry Lawson’s poem After All:

We’ll live for life and the best it brings till our twilight shadows fall;
And I fain would think that this world of ours is a good world after all