The Longest Day

"If I didn't have such a big pack I'd pat myself on the back."-Me

Before I do anything else, I must address a grievous error in the previous post. I referred to the backpack I've brought here from the United States as "my pack." This is false, the backpack belongs to my dear vet student brother. In return for using it, I am expected to tutor him on the hibernation patterns of echidnas. All he, or you, needs to know about is this: they sleep and they sleep around (true story I wrote that on an exam when I was studying Tasmanian fuana. For more information on echidnas please see the post from a few years ago). Two other facts for fun: 1, spell check thought echidna was actually a misspelling of enchilada; 2, baby echidnas are called puggles and they are not cute.

Second thing to address is my other horrible mistake. Isabel and I were both pretty tired so we went to sleep immediately last night. Then we woke up about halfway through the night because it was so horribly, cripplingly cold. We each put on lots of layers in our sleeping bags, but I'm not sure if we really got much sleep for the rest of the night. We were just waiting for it to be light enough so that we could start moving around and warm up.
It turns out that all the dew froze because it still below freezing, and we thus found little ice pellets sticking to our tent and especially on the metal poles.

the shiny bits are ice and the not dark black on the pole is also frost

I am smart and threw on my gloves to take care of disassembling the tent. The gloves were cheap and not waterproof so all the frost melted in my hands and soon I had to take the gloves off in order to keep my fingers. Honestly the gloves had only made things worse. This meant during the beginning of the morning I had to resort to (wool) sock gloves, a trick I picked up running in Maine. It was shocking that it was this cold. Why would it be the same temperature as yesterday morning? How could we have predicted that? Estimates are that at the coldest it got down to -7 C (19 F) (no one got up to look at the thermometer during the night. I did try to take a picture of it in the morning, but my hands were shaking to much). Finally we got the tent packed and my hands almost warm again, and then it was travel time.

Our view for much of yesterday and today: Barn Bluff. We passed it yesterday and lost sight of it today

Today was tough, possibly the hardest day we'll have out here. We combined two days into one, and hiked from Waterfall Valley to Pelion Hut, passing the Windemere Hut on the way. Getting to Windemere was a breeze. We opted not to do a side trip to Lake Will because we had enough distance to travel already today, but I still took a picture of it

Lake Will

Anyway, we cruised to Windemere, stopping for lunch a little bit before it because we figured it was still an hour away. We were wrong, Windemere Lake appeared maybe 10 minutes later and then we made it to the hut (it had a crayfish drawing on the door). We hung out there for a little while despite having just stopped for lunch. It was a pretty hut and the lake was beautiful.

She loves all the pictures I take of her

Isabel stuck her feet in, but I was not so brave, and took pictures of her instead.

Part one of the day had been a rousing success, and it was time to press on. We then spent the longest four hours of our lives muddily slogging  another 12km or so to Pelion Hut. Part of the problem is that we probably saw the next Pelion after 4k, but rather than heading towards it, we had to skirt a huge vale through muddy and indistinct forests.

Why go straight (which includes a kind of canyon that you can't see from this picture) when you can go around instead?

Adding to the feeling that it was taking forever was the fact that once we were in the forest, there were no landmarks. The one alledged place to keep an eye out for was never marked, only adding to our confusion. Once we started going uphill we knew we things would be fine, as our map also gave us a good idea of where the elevation changes were. Still, for a while we were a bit worried we were lost. There just weren't many trail markers in the forest (probably in part because it was impossible to miss the trail. Here's how to find it: you see the only trail in the forest, stay on it).

I also want to break here to talk about the rangers. They maintained the trail amazingly and made sure the huts were clean and really did a great job making our lives a little easier. Here's an example

It doesn't need to be bigger, it's starts to look worse when expanded

We met another guy part way in. He had forgotten a camera at a little bridge that we had passed a moment before. He grabbed the camera and started running back towards Pelion Hut. I offered to let him carry my pack for me, but he demurred. Apparently he had his own 3km up the path and didn't feel like being generous. Jerk. We limped our way into camp and all but collapsed in the doorway. This was a much bigger hut than Waterfall Valley, able to sleep probably thirty people. On top of that it had four separate sleeping rooms off of the dining area. Privacy! The guy we met before and his two companions had one room, and a Taiwanese girl had another. We claimed a third. Mark and Craig got there a little after us and claimed the fourth. Let's introduce the new characters. The three guys were from SA (South Australia) and kind of doing a gap year/no money for Uni year. They were named James, Riley, and Ben. James being the one we met before, and arguably responsible for forgetting the camera. They will hereafter be referred to as "the boys." The young woman from Thaiwan was named Iris, and is considered by all to be a total badass. She was hiking solo, which we all agree is impressive. Finally there are still Mark and Craig, who actually have an identical Track itinerary to us, so we'll be seeing them a few more times. As for tomorrow, we're all going to the same place, the Kia Orra hut via Mount Ossa (sidetrip up the tallest mountain in Tasmania). 

I almost forgot what made the day worth it. When we got to camp we saw a wallaby! Why does no one seem excited about this? I forgot to mention the wallaby also had a joey, does that help?

Honestly it's a little cuter in concept than in reality, but that's ok

An important update on food. Mark had extra cutlery and took pity on me, especially when Isabel's fancy travel spork broke (we fixed it with tape).

And a final note. the chooks did calm last night, it was probably too cold to strut around after dark. I'm also wondering if their yelling at us was in fact a warning about how cold it was going to get. Maybe they were trying to look out for us and we just didn't listen. Sigh. Tonight we're inside and warm.