This photo was taken on my first trip out with my DSLR. In my first trip to the Tasmanian West Coast in over 15 years, the main purpose of the journey was to experience the wonderful Wilderness Railway, better known as the Abt. Built in the 1890s by the Mt Lyell Mining Company, the railway connected Strahan and Queenstown for a number of years, before being closed in the mid 1960s and rails ripped up. In the late 1990s money was granted to re-establish the railway as a tourist venture.
In the photo here we see Abt Locomotive #1 taking on water at Rinadeena – the highest point of the journey and the lunchtime stopover. This is a tremendous journey and I would recommend it to anyone who happens to have a spare day when visiting the Tasmanian West Coast.
Hello to all the people visiting from the photos posted on the Mercury Website. Rather than showing you the same photos again, I thought I would put up some video.
Couple of corrections on my part to be made. Repulse Dam is 28 MegaWatt, not 40, and there are also Liapootah and Wayatinah stations upstream of Catagunya, which in the excitement of the moment I ommitted from commentary.
Please be sure to visit again, as I will put up pictures of my travels around the Derwent Valley over the coming week.
Making an impulsive decision to go and see the Clarke Dam spilling for the first time in a long time, I jumped in the car this morning with camera and started driving to Butlers Gorge. What I had not counted on was the snow. While the above picture has the nice effect of making the forest look wonderful with snow, it does nothing for the ability to drive on snow without snowchains. Not long after taking this photo, it got too dangerous and I was forced to abandon the trip. I did however get quite a lot of photos & video of the Derwent Valley in flood, and I will share these over the course of the next week or two. Please continue reading to see the conditions I was driving in..
I don’t normally try to take advantage of current events with old photography, but seeing there is such an interest I am going right ahead anyway. In the last week or so the Cataract Gorge in Launceston has been in flood as the Trevallyn Dam spills. This is always quite a spectacular site. These photos were taken a while ago now, but the impact remains the same.
Marriot Falls was the ultimate destination of my trip that went via Lake Meadowbank. The track to get there was a little different to what was advertised on other websites. The falls themselves are quite spectacular, and I believe moreso than the Russell Falls nearby. Unfortunately due to the higher than normal water flow due to recent rains, I was unable to get as close as I would have liked, and as a result the photo has been obscured by trees.
So Saturday’s walk didn’t go to plan. I had in fact set out to find the Disappearing Tarn in the alpine regions of Mount Wellington. From accounts by other people, I got to within 750m of it but due to conditions, and how I was equipped, I turned back.
From a photographic perspective, the day was a complete bust. Walked 4.5 hours, and took less than a dozen images, of which this photo of a Richea Dracophylla was the only one I was happy with. Nine out of the 11 different species of richea are endemic to Tasmania, with the most well known being the Richea Pandanifolia, better known as the Pandani or Giant Grass Tree.
And what of the Disappearing Tarn? Well, true to form it disappeared. Reports from other bushwalkers who made it there that day described it more as an average rockpool rather than the tarn with the ethereal blue water.
