It's Coldest before DAWN

There can only be one moment like this. There will never be another one quite like it. Even if the opposite was true, I’d choose to forget all other moments, for this. This simple moment, when the clouds lift and the mountains appear, as if a magician has conjured them up from the grey, heavy mist. Sprawled out before me is a landscape that’s older than the wheel, and much older than me or my memories.

It’s the Southern Ranges, in all their glory, with swirling mist highlighting a series of peaks, and the hundred colours of the sunset reminding me of the latent wonder of Tasmania’s Southwest. It’s been three days since I’ve seen anything other than the belly of a cloud, which swallowed me a lifetime ago. Now, as I feel the fading sun’s warming fingers on my face, I accept all the hardships I’ve gone through to end up here. The mud, the scrub, the weight of my pack; in this moment they all vanish. For a brief moment, I even forget about the promise of dinner. This is a rare moment indeed.

THE IDEA TO UNDERTAKE A TRAVERSE of Tasmania came to me the way water bubbles up from a mountain spring—clear and nourishing. My gut told me it was a good idea, so I went with it. I began planning. In the end, it took me three years to prepare for my trip. My intention was to travel through Tasmania’s western wilderness, and to return with a story and photographs that capture the essence of the landscape and the inner journey of the traveller.

My route was picked to maximise wild scenery. This implied a skyline traverse of Tasmania. I was to follow the watershed line that runs along the spine of the prominent mountain ranges. Along these ridgelines, the vegetation is thinned out by the severity of the alpine weather, allowing for relatively open walking compared to the scrub-choked valleys. Naturally, there is a catch—the storms the Roaring Forties bring in from the Southern Ocean always hit hardest high up in