On A Winter's Night ...
It had been a while since I’d had a pack on my back and the wilder world at my feet. The garden had taken over a little: filling the available time, sure, but also being another conversation with the natural world that felt almost as sustaining as a hike and a camp.
There’s more to that thought, things that go to the essence of how different things nourish us.
The garden is something of a wrestle for a degree of control, a shaping of the natural world to some end, aesthetic or productive. Walking in comparatively untouched country gets a little closer to the Thoreau idea: ‘It is when we are not guilty of imposing our own purposes onto the world that we are able to view it on its own terms.’
That’s the hike: the chance to lose yourself in something big and ungoverned. We should bring a little of that spirit to our gardens I think. There’s something precious in bringing a little of that world ‘on its own terms’ close to where we live. Sink ourselves in it.
This was just a little walk. For the inner Melburnian with a couple of days and a yen to get somewhere among the snow gums and higher, Mount Stirling is a splendid option. Less than four hours’ drive and a carpark that’s halfway up the mountain. Win.
There was snow on top, but only an inch or two. It had been a dry winter to this point, but cold enough. Resorts were making snow with a will, or at least to the point where they didn’t trigger their refund guarantees.
About a k from the car on the way up the Bluff Ridge track is home to at least a pair of lyrebirds ... well they were there last time I was here, maybe two years back. And yep, just down there in the valley was the tell-tale cacophony of a lyrebird in full swing: the slightly sharper, louder, calls and the sense that somewhere quite close was a meeting of every bird variety in the vicinity. I picture them sitting in a circle like some kind of avian stop work meeting. Except of course it’s just one bird, switching mid phrase from currawong to kookaburra.
The walk to the top here is just 5k or so, and a very easy gently sloping stroll through upright stands of alpine ash, greenly mossed outcrops of exposed granite and the eventual twists and turns of snow gums.
I camp by the Bluff Ridge hut and take a wander toward the summit ... but everything is grey in low and sweeping cloud. I’ll try again in the morning, but by then the cloud will have come in thicker, the wind will be gusting to 50k or so, and according to the BOM there will be a ‘feels like’ of about -12.
There’s nothing that plucks you from the routine comforts of urban life quite as effectively as a night under canvas in snow. The wind flaps and cracks at the tent walls. It’s so cold there’s an almost hallucinatory sense of comfort from turning on a warmly yellow tent light. And yet it’s a wonderfully alive feeling, to know that your comfort, if not survival, rests on your own preparation and the kit you bring with you. The scaffolding of routine life is stripped away. It’s you, two sheets of thin nylon and the weather. That and a rather lovely down bag. Let’s not forget the sleeping bag.
Great to be out. To feel weather on my skin. To breathe wilder air. And then slink back to the car.