Trickle Falls and Dry Falls 2018 Sept
With an inauspicious name like “Trickle Falls”, don’t expect too much. If you use a powerful magnifier, you might find the trickle that elevated its name from “Nothing Falls”.
Trickle Falls and Dry Falls. Do these names excite you in a waterfall? No? Well, I guess the falls didn’t excite us much either, but one visits waterfalls for many reasons. I think all three modes of waterfall visiting have their place, either to please three different kinds of people and capabilities and desires, or even one person in three different moods. Sometimes you go just to see something beautiful to photograph, but that involves no adventure at all (Russell, Nelson, Horseshoe, Liffey, Lillydale and more). Sometimes, you visit something that has a little bit of an adventure, and a beautiful waterfall at the end as well, like Machinery Creek Falls, or Tin Spur Falls or McGowan Falls, to name just a few of Tasmania’s many treasures in this realm. These falls usually have a pad of sorts, so the adventure aspect is minimal, but you still feel a certain sense of reward for having got there, despite the prevalence of seemingly ubiquitous pink tape that you possibly try to avoid in order to have the adventure you feel like having that day. Other days you don’t feel like thinking, you are in zombie mode, and the pink tape means you can zone out for a while.
Hygrocybe cheerli, I believe (near the later visited, Evercreech Falls.
But if you are up for a real adventure – if you wish to satisfy that primaeval spirit of ‘the explorer’ that still lurks inside some of us, and which, being the lucky, lucky denizens of a place like Tasmania that still has places that remain essentially wild (whether called wilderness or not), then you can get a map, spot a little line on it, and navigate yourself off to that waterfall, not having a clue what you will find. Such was the case for Carrie and me – and Tessa – on Sunday, when I decided our waterfalls for the day (well, the first two of our seven) would be two marks on the map in between Mathinna Falls and Evercreech Falls, up on a ridge to the east of Evercreech Road (and Evercreech Rivulet).
And of course, to be dubbed Dry Falls gives you no chance, ever.
We both imagined beautiful rainforest like the forest surrounding the two falls of the big names. Not so. This forest was as dry as a bone, with fallen timber everywhere, and not at all appealing. Oh well, luck of the draw. We also expected falling water at such a mark on the map. Wrong again. As you can tell by the names we have given these falls so we can talk about them, the first had barely enough to get wet if you needed a wash, and the second would leave you utterly parched if you were thirsty.
The consolation prize for the morning: Evercreech Falls.
But we are not sad. We took photos for the heck of it, but rejoiced in the adventure we’d had playing at being explorers. It’s a fun adventure, a fun life. However, we then moved on to our consolation prizes of Evercreech Falls and Mathinna Falls, which Carrie, living as she does way to the west on the NW coast, hadn’t yet seen. Evercreech and the first three tiers of Mathinna were repeats for me, but I never mind that.
Fallen sassafras blossoms litered the ground and settled on the moss, like confetti at a wedding. It was wonderful.
The real adventure of the day turned out to be waterfall number seven, which was Mathinna Tier 4, a fun climb – a little scary – and a real feeling of triumph when we looked across at them. Omg, they are absolutely HUGE. We had that wonderulfly spooky feeling that very few humans on the planet today can have – the feeling that perhaps you are standing where maybe no humans have ever stood. The bush was very thick; the climb had been very steep on quite loose ground; we had pushed through rubbish to be where we were (with me breaking down several dead shrubs to enable our progress), and the view was not utterly brilliant, but we were seeing something very special, and it thrilled us. (For photos and report, see the blog on this that will be posted within the next day or so).
To get there, we hung a right (east) off Evercreech Road, climbing up to the left of the ridge of the knobble there. The road was dodgy. I was grateful that we were in my Subaru Forester and not in a 2WD. … And then the road became even dodgier, but we pressed on, and parked up the top. The cyan route is the walking part. You can see where we dropped down to the two falls concerned. They are “waterfall baggers only” type falls.