The lake says nothing. Nor do
the trees, the birds, the mountain. Even the sky is quiet, showing the sun to
bed; the moon and stars to their posts.
 |
[Early evening at Lake Myrtle, with Mt Rogoona behind] |
We fuss around getting
comfortable, as you must in a tent, before the silence begins to settle on us
as well. It is a profound thing to be horizontal and quiet in such stillness.
We surface slowly in the
morning; taking our time over breakfast; enjoying the superb scene from the
campsite. It is calm and lightly overcast, a perfect morning for walking … and
for sandflies. They hover around us in increasing numbers. We don’t have the
terror of them that we would in New Zealand, as we’ve not known them to be
nearly as fierce in Tasmania. But they are enough of a nuisance to get us
thinking about moving.
Our recovery from the
previous day’s walk has been good. Although we’re not rushing to heed Mt
Rogoona’s “here am I, climb me!” siren call, my optimism is chattering away
inside my head over breakfast. Lynne’s is less vocal. She feels good, but a
pre-existing knee niggle is lurking.
We decide to go for “a bit of
a wander towards” Rogoona. To me that’s code for getting to the top, but I
don’t want to push it. We ascend the saddle between Lakes Myrtle and Lake
Meston, taking our time, finding much to distract us, from flowering berries to a
quickly-disappearing tiger snake.
 |
At the saddle a cairn marks
our turnoff. Once off track I’m prepared to follow my nose. This is my third
time on the mountain, and the weather and destination are both clear enough.
But we find large and obvious rock cairns on our route, and start to lock onto
these. I relate to Lynne my tenuous faith in cairns: they may only tell us
where somebody else was when they were lost. But being a newbie off-track
walker she’s ready to see them as signposts.
 |
[Pool with pencil pines near Mt Rogoona] |
We slow down as the cairns
become sparser and the going a little rougher. Our pace is slow, and we seem to
spend as much time searching for cairns as actually walking. My for-once-clear
memory of the ascent of Rogoona is that it is quite drawn out. And at the top
I’m almost sure there’s one of those “oh no … surely not!” extra little
scrambles. We reach a high point and sit down for a break. It turns into lunch,
and quickly thereafter into our turn-around point. Lynne’s been doing the maths
– with an increasingly sore knee in mind – and she realises it’ll be many hours
before we get to the summit and back.
 |
[An earlier summit trip, Mt Rogoona with Lk Myrtle below] |
I’ve been to the top of
Rogoona twice in recent years, so I’m only disappointed that Lynne won’t get to
see that wonderful view. On the other hand it’s starting to cloud over again,
so we’re not even assured of a view. I make one condition for my surrender: we
won’t return via cairns. We’ll take what I’ve always called “the pretty way”. Family
legend is that as a young child I used to nag my father to drive home via
waterfalls or forested gullies. “Can we go the pretty way Dad??” Some things
never change.
By going the pretty way and
abandoning cairns we’re soon reaping rewards. The rocky, undulating flanks of
Rogoona have been scoured and scooped during the ice ages. At intervals this
has resulted in small pools, some fringed with pencil pines.
 |
[Signs of hope: young pencil pines, Mt Rogoona] |
For the next hour or more
summits, cairns and knees are forgotten as we slowly wander from pool to pool. If
we’re “lost”, it’s only in wonder. Each pencil pine discovery is like a significant
find. Many hundreds of pines were killed by the 1980s fire in this area alone.
When we find a large mature
stand in a sphagnum-filled hollow it feels like a triumph. Upwards of twenty
thriving, conical trees are clustered together in perfect conditions. But at
the margin of the grove we find several large dead trees. Their blackened
trunks signal how close this fire got to taking out the whole stand. Further on
we find a few young pines, and are glad at this sign of slow recruitment of
trees where conditions are right.
 |
[Pencil pines: survivors alongside victims of fire] |
Reluctantly we leave the
mountain and wander back towards the lake. But by now we have our eye in, and
the return trip is slow, punctuated by stops to take in scoparia here, mountain
rocket there, skittering skinks everywhere.
 |
[Scoparia blooms] |
The bonus on our arrival back
at the lake is the time and energy for a soak in its immaculate waters. We’ve learned, yet again, that just being
among mountains can be as wondrous as being on top of them.
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