Field trips in Tasmania

Tasmanian field trips are quite notorious for weather that's fantastic one day, snowing or raining horizontally the next. See the attached photo of our lab tech, Scott, for the glorious weather we cored in during December (yes, that's supposed to be summer Downunder) a few years ago. Luckily, this was one of the field trips where we actually had a motel room and restaurant meal waiting for us at the end of the day. Other trips involve crawling into sodden tents and cooking up dinner using the faithful trangia in the tent vestibule. Believe it or not, I really enjoy those particular trips.

Mt Read in northwestern Tasmania is very exposed to all the wind and rain coming off the Southern Ocean, so the trees up there are really doing it tough. Here's one tree that's really having a hard time sitting on a rock (Lonely_Athrotaxis).  This tree is actually several hundred years old! This is another site you can come down from and stay in warm accommodation in a nearby town.

But sometimes the weather is fantastic and you can see the amazing landscape.  Lakes Vera and Marilyn sit under the impressive Frenchman's Cap in western Tasmania.  The day the two attached photos were taken it was about 30 C.  We had to walk 'around' the lake, but spent quite a bit of time wading in it (all to better see where the trees we were after were of course).  That was also easier as the scrub can be quite dense on the shore. The tree I'm coring is an old Huon Pine up at Lake Marilyn (LMarilyncoringTas).

And, lastly, a couple of pictures showing the old rainforest at Cradle Mt. The first one (Young_KingBilly_pine) shows a very young sapling that has established itself on an old fallen log.  Some of these logs that Jonathan, the marvellous Pavla and I cored date back 1700 years (i.e. to about 300AD)! The other photo shows the disturbed rainforest.  It looks like something big fell down here a long time ago.

The New Zealand bush is just as spectacular and of course they have bigger mountains. But the weather in summer can be just as bad - or good - as it is in Tasmania. I always look forward to going on Jonathan's field trips in NZ.