Tales of Tall Trees

Michelle and the beanstalk

Treetop Walk

Going Up

Can you find Michelle?

Karri Trees

The South-West part of Western Australia is very proud of their tall trees. It has lots of them, and lots of ways to experience them.

The most famous way is the “Valley of the Giants Tree Top Walk”. Here, four tall circular platforms are linked by bow-like steel walkways that climb gently into the forest canopy. We watch a couple turn around at the first platform and come back down.

“I didn’t expect it to sway like that,” is their excuse to us as they exit though the entrance gate.

Jim and I walk up to the platform and look at each other.

“It does have quite the sway, doesn’t it?”

The literature tells us that the structure is designed to sway to ‘enhance the feeling of being in the forest canopy’. The actual walkway surface is open for the same reason. You can look between your feet, forty meters straight down or look out into the thick, green gum leaves of the rare Tingle Tree or the more common Karri Tree. These trees can reach eighty meters high and can live for almost 500 years.

The walkway is 600 meters long. To preserve the forest it was built to display, the walkway was constructed using only pulleys, hoists and jacks. Impact on the forest floor is minimal – occupying only four square meters.

There is another well known way to experience the tall West Australia trees – climb them.

Eight fire lookouts were built around the 1940’s – actually built in the tops of some of the tallest trees in the forest. One is still used for fire spotting on occasion. Two others are maintained solely for tourists to climb.

This is a ‘jack-and-the-beanstalk’ kind of thing. Picture a huge Karri gum tree. Stand at its base. Look past the warning signs explaining that you might die. On the tree trunk are metal spikes; less than an inch in diameter and just about three feet long. They’re pounded into the trunk in a spiral fashion – the rungs of a tree ladder.

I stand at the bottom of the tree with a couple of English travelers.

“I thought there would be more of a net,” one of them says. There is thin mesh above you with holes about eight inches square. It might stop a branch from hitting you if it fell, but it would do nothing to stop you hitting the ground if you slip off a rung.

Of the over 200,000 people who visit the Gloucester tree each year, less than a quarter of them climb to the top. I was determined to be one of them. The English couple climb a short way then head back down.

“We’ll pass,” they tell us.

Heights are about mind games. You can climb a step ladder, have no thought of falling and feel no nerves. What difference should another hundred or two feet make? Hang on tight. Always three points of contact. Don’t think about it - just go up – 153 rungs up - two-hundred feet up.

I have to stop and catch my breath. I look down. Oh my, the van seems small. Those spots are people. Hang on tight – there’s no reason to think you’ll fall. My shoulder brushing the tree trunk gives some security.

Diamond Tree has an added challenge. A sudden storm blows in and thunder crashes as I’m ten feet from the top. Then there’s the ladder.

To enter the lookout platform itself, one has to leave the spikes and go onto a regular ladder. This ladder is very secure, anchored by angle iron beams. However, at seventy meters above ground, the ladder is actually away from the tree trunk by about a foot. The transition gives me pause, and some more pause.

I think of my niece Hayley. We were scrambling to a peak in the Rockies and it got a bit dicey. I told her we’d come a long way up and we could turn round no problems.

“What!” she yells back at me. “Then I’d get to say ‘I nearly climbed a mountain!!’”

I think of Hayley, reach out to the ladder, and climb.