Destination: Grampians!

Mountains. For years, I've been wanting to see mountains (yes, "mountains, Gandalf!") again, because we just don't have them in South Australia. The last time I saw a mountain with my own eyeballs was almost twenty years ago (Alaska, where else?) so ...

The Grampians lie in the far, far west of Victoria, which to us is a five hour drive east. To give you some context here --

Climb into a decent car. Start where it says ADELAIDE and end where you see that orange balloon, which is pointing at a gorgeous little town called Halls Gap. That's where you're going, with a booking at the fantastic Halls Gap Log Cabins.

The scale of the above map doesn't matter much, because how fast you can do the journey depends on so many factors (differing state speed limits, road construction, how fast you feel comfortable driving, what your car will do without protest ... the number of humongous trucks on the road, how often you need to stop and rest, if you're going cafe to cafe ... whatever). 'Nuff said if I tell you, it's five and a half hours if you don't stop at all, and closer to seven and a half in reality, because if you don't stop, you'll probably drive right in front of one of the aforementioned gigantic trucks.

But the drive can be fun in its own way, and I'll tell the story of that in another post. For now, this is a look at the Grampians themselves ...

Lake Wartook

One of numerous waterfalls at Mackenzie Falls

And again, let me give you a bit of context here:

The whole Grampians area was created a national part only as recently as 1984, and it's a mercy that this was done because agriculture, logging, residential building ... it's all impacted enormously. It was only a matter of time before someone found something to mine there, and ...! Thank heavens, the national park status protects this, ostensibly forever.

The region itself is ancient. I'll save you zipping all over the Internet and paste in this segment direct from the Victorian Tourism site:

Aboriginal people have had an association with the Grampians for more than 30,000 years. Traditionally known as Gariwerd, the land is at the center of creation stories for many of the Aboriginal communities in south-western Victoria. Discoveries of Indigenous Australian artifacts in the region include ancient oven mounds, scatterings of stone left over from tool making, and ancient rock art sites.

Six seasons

The traditional owners of Gariwerd recognize six distinct weather periods in the seasonal cycle, which relate to climactic as well as environmental events such as plant flowering, fruiting and the behavioural patterns of local wildlife. For millennia, the Jardwadjali and Djab Wurrung people have been linked to this seasonal cycle, which includes Gwangal Moronn (the season of the honey bee), Chinnup (the season of cockatoos) and Petyan (the season of butterflies). 

The first thing someone like myself says, upon getting into the mountains is, "OMG, it's like Scotland!" (Okay, that's the second thing. The first thing is, "My God, they're big, they're huge, I had no idea they were this enormous, they don't look so vast from a distance..."). In fact, Gariwerd was promptly renamed as the Grampians by oncoming Scotsman Sir Thomas Mitchell, for the most obvious of reasons! This, from Wikipedia:

Named Gariwerd by one of the local Australian Aboriginal languages, either the Jardwadjali or Djab Wurrung language, the ranges were given their European name in 1836 by Surveyor General of New South Wales Sir Thomas Mitchell after the Grampian Mountains in his native Scotland. After a two-year consultation process, the park was renamed Grampians (Gariwerd) National Park in 1991, however this controversial formality was reversed after a change of state government in 1992. The Geographic Place Names Act, 1998 (Vic) reinstated dual naming for geographical features, and this has been subsequently adopted in the park based on Jardwadjali and Djab Wurrung names for rock art sites and landscape features with the National Heritage List referring to "Grampians National Park (Gariwerd)".

In fact, tourist is the area's One Big Thing at this moment. The town of Halls Gap is quite literally one enormous hotel sprawling out through the "gap" itself ... which is a pass through the flat bottom of a narrow valley through the mountains, frequently lost under morning mist. From Boroka Lookout, at an altitude of 616m right above, you can look down on the town, see it appear out of the mist rather like Brigadoon, as the run rises...

Boroka Lookout, looking toward Lake Bellfield ... Halls Gap is down below, right in the mountain pass...

Boroka Lookout on a misty morning. Halls Gap appears out of the mist like Brigadoon...

The river of mist has completely covered Halls Gap. Down below, it's silvery with fog in the town...

Dave captured this shot of me photographing the dawn at Boroka Lookout. Neat!

I can say without hesitation, the Grampians is one of the most glorious places on this planet, on a par with the Alaska Range, the wilds of Canada, you name it. And the wonderful thing about it is, we don't have to fly across the world. A long drive, and we arrive on the same day we set out, without even seeing an airport from a distance (nudge, wink ... anyone else out there detest airports, though they love flying??) or even boarding a train.

The Grampians offer absolutely everything. Want a top-notch hotel or a cozy log cabin? Done. Fancy restaurant? No problem. Rock climbing? Birding? Blue lakes? Wildlife? Hiking? Photography, art? Here we go --

Lake Wartook, seen from the other side of the carpark at Reed Lookout

The Grampians, from a Wartook Valley roadside

Dave sits on that famous rocky ledge at Boroka Lookout, in the dawn light. 616 empty meters under your feet there...

A wedge tailed eagle has discovered dinner in a paddock in Victoria Valley

Wallabies, kangaroos, emus, echidnas and bilbies abound right in the heart of Halls Gap itself

Or if culture is your thing, try the Brambuck Cultural Centre --

-- but be sure to set aside a whole day for this. If you try to stroll through in an hour, you'll miss so much. We just didn't have the time to do this properly, so ... next time.

Or, if the more recent history of the area is on your mind, a lot of info is given in situ, on the info boards at the various lookouts. Such as this, at Mount William:

Admittedly, we ran through the Grampians. We had three days, all up, including the drive out and back. So we did ... one fancy restaurant, one cafe, one waterfall, two lakes, four or five lookouts, one camp ground, two dawns, and an enormous amount of driving.

We covered 1,500kms in all, and I can honestly say, we saw Gariwerd from the road...

Stand in the street in Halls Gap and look up. This is how you'll see the Grampians!

A roadside shot, in Victoria Valley

Amazing landscapes, every time you turn around another bend in the road

Full marks to the Victorian government for the road system that threads through and around the Grampians. The roads are in fantastic repair, and they're very well signed. The only thing South Aussies may find somewhat perplexing is that many of the roads are marked up as "driving hazards," or "dangerous conditions," and so forth. In fact, by comparison with our Adelaide Hills (Norton Summit, anyone?!) the Grampians are an easy, easy drive. They're not dangerous at all at this time of year. I do wonder what it'd be like to drive them in winter. It does snow there. Mount William is tall enough ... this, from the Halls Gap Lakeside webpage:

Having spent my childhood in Holland I never realized how many Australians have never experienced snow! This might be your chance, without spending an absolute fortune visiting the snow fields! Although snowfall in the valley itself is rare, Mt William (the highest point in the Grampians at 1167 meters) gets covered in snow nearly every winter, it’s great for making a snowman. The Grampians turns into a winter wonderland, beyond beauty!

Oh, yes, I'm tempted. Very tempted. We went there (for the first time!) and the end of the first month of autumn, or fall, if you prefer, and it was already very chilly in the mornings, though you were glad to get out of the sweaters and scarves by ten o'clock...

Lake Bellfield, on the outskirts of Halls Gap

A misty dawn, from Boroka Lookout

Halls Gap is lost in the mist, 616m below...

In other posts, I'll share the drive to get there and back, which is an adventure in itself! Mother Nature had one special gift in store: the most incredible sunset on the river at Tailem Bend. Soon!

Alaska Memories -- Post One of many during the coming months...

Jade arrived in Alaska back in the late 1990s on a flying visit ... and the rest his history. Here is Anchorage,
photographed from Earthquake Park, looking across Knik Arm to Bootleggers' Cove --
the sky is full of swallows ... and all images in these posts way predate digital: they're scans.

Downtown Fairbanks in the summer: Golden Heart Plaza, photographed
from across the Chena River at the end of the long drive from Anchorage...

Road trips in Alaska involve a lot of this...

... and jewels like Thunderbird Falls are hiding away, waiting to be
discovered. And oh, how Jade wishes that digital photography had
arrived about a decade earlier!

Alaska was a photographer's paradise. Here is Broad Pass in March ... and often, what seems to be
classic wilderness photography will be revealed --

-- with a slightly different camera angle, and less zoom, to be a shot from the roadside! These images were
taken in March 1999, when Dave and Jade were headed for Anchorage. Uh ... honeymoon. 

In fact, may of Jade's memories of Alaska are typified by this on-road, driving shot, and --

-- this one. Shooting through the windscreen, with Dave driving. Driving what, now?

It's a Pontiac Sunfire, the 1996 model. Here's Dave plus Sunfire on a roadside near Fairbanks...

...and Dave's shot of Jade plus Sunfire, by a lake somewhere near the Richardson Highway --
perhaps between Delta and Summit, not far from Summit Lake (though this is not Summit Lake itself).

Long, long before there was the Millennium Possum or Lola, there was this real beauty...

...which we bought between us in 1999, in the days when the plan was
that Jade was moving to Fairbanks, rather than Dave heading south!
Here she is in a parking lot not far from Portage Glacier...

...and another parking lot not far from Fairbanks.

Fairbanks has a charm all its own, and Jade became very fond of it. In the shot of Golden Heart Plaza above
(remember the clock tower?), it's summer. Here's the same place in winter -- photographed from the bridge, and
the Chena River is totally frozen in ... they'll be racing dog teams on this in a week's time --

Here's the Open North American dog mushing event starting, downtown --

The Open North American dog sled race heads down the frozen Chena River...

...and meanwhile one of the local sprint races heads off into positively Arctic wastes just outside Fairbanks.
(Yes, it was cold. Very. Especially when you were in Australia just a few days before, at 100 degrees!)

Speaking of dog mushing, the Yukon Quest dog sled race -- Fairbanks, AK, to Whitehorse, Yukon (Canada) -- is
run in February. Here's the checkpoint at Angel Creek, albeit in summer.

Take off! A float plane heads off on a fishing charter from Fish Lake near Talkeetna --

-- summer in much of Alaska is typified by warm, humid days, velvety sunlight, the smell of spruce on the air and
the heavy bass drone of light aircraft, like this one.

And right after this charter leaves, another is lined up right behind it. Busy! Talkeetna is a great place to start a
fishing holiday. It's also the gathering place and starting point for climbers tackling Denali, known to those
from "outside" as Mt. McKinley.

The Alaska Bush Float Plane Service operates out of Fish Lake. That's their office, at right, with a sod roof.
We were told, if we'd only arrived one week earlier that roof was blooming with flowers! 

Then fall comes to the rolling hills around Fairbanks, and the landscape is magical ...

You have to be quick: the fall colors don't last long -- often just days...

-- but if you can be there in time, with cameras loaded, you can walk right into an enchanted forest.

Here's a stand of birch turned to gold at UAF.

The beauty of being in an area for a long time, or making many visits, is
that you come to know it, and can photograph it in many seasons. Jade sat on
that bench and, from it, here's the view:

-- a photo-op point, quite close to Trapper Creek, on the Parks Highway. And --

Here is Dave's shot of Jade in the act of taking the photo right below --
spot the two trees with the tiny one between them:

And then, approximately the same location in spring --

And again, in winter, where the mountains look like the fantasy pavilions of an army of giants.

Heading south from the Trapper Creek area takes you through the Mat-Su Valley -- the Matanuska-Susitna Valley
-- on your way into Anchorage. It's an interesting drive in March, with leaden-gray skies and snow on the way.
In this shot, you're just about to head into the valley from the north.

Near the McHugh Creek exit, on the Seward Highway, which hugs the shore of Turnagain Arm. The sea has
thawed by now, but not very long before --

Here's the Knik Arm, photographed from Point Woronzof Park, right behind Anchorage Airport, with
Mount Susitna -- "Sleeping Lady" -- on the horizon. That's quite the ocean view!

But, as Dave's father used to say, "When the sun shines there's no more beautiful place than Alaska."
He was right. He still is. And Jade is making major plans for returning there, many times, in many seasons,
to photograph it all again now that the digital age has arrived!

After hunting high and low for my Alaska photos, I'd given up on finding them at least until we move house again, and get to unpack a lot of boxes that are, right now, packed and stacked. If you know us, you know we're nomads of necessity, serial gypsies, moving house way too often -- which is the curse of folks who rent, at least in Australia, where rental properties are a form of investment, being bought and sold for gain every few years.

But then -- looking for something else entirely, lo and behold! A box of photos popped out of a basket I hadn't seen in a year! Now, not all my Alaska pictures have turned up: Anchorage, Fairbanks, Denali National Park, Stampede Trail, the Kenai boat tour ... those are still packed. They're in albums, whereas it's a box of photos that's reappeared. Also, all (yes all) of my slides vanished into some box, somewhere, nine years ago, and I haven't seen them since. I have to believe they're in the house somewhere, but the only things I recall clearly by now is that I had scores of fantastic images from the World Ice Art Championships, 1999, and some equally fantastic shots captured off the stern of the tour boat Kenai Star in 1997.

But at least I have a place to start here: a box with about 800 photos ... and a scanner.

Everything you see here, and will be seeing in posts similar to this one in the months (and years!) ahead, will have gone through the scanning process: scanned at 600dpi, cropped, enhanced, resized. And I do believe I'm catching these pictures in the nick of time. What you see here is the enhanced version ... the pictures are up to 17 years old, and they're starting to fade. Some are fading quite badly, soooo...

I'll be processing as many as I can on an afternoon, once a week, and will upload the best of them here, with stories attached. Everything you see here is Jade's work, unless Jade is actually in the picture, in which case it's Dave taking the shot ...duh.

For those photographically inclined: everything you see here (except Dave's shots) was captured with the Pentax K-1000 ... those cameras are indestructible. I had two -- still have them, and they're still my film camera of choice. You cannot hurt them or stop them: big steel body, simple, simple system -- nothing to go wrong. The more fiddly and "clever" cameras get, the more they go "bung." With the Pentax K-1000, you were on your own: automatic nothing. You did everything yourself, from exposure to focus ... and I have dropped one out of a car, in a parking lot in Denali National Park, picked it up, and found nary a dent in it, much less a fault! If we still used film cameras today, these are the ones I'd still be using ... and you can still buy them. They change hands on eBay for about $125 even now.

But there is, in fact, no comparison between film and digital, in terms of the quality you can expect in the images (not the mention the fact that digital pictures don't fade over time, and never need rescuing), so the Pentaxes are boxed ... they're keepsakes, while their work is being salvaged, processed, enhanced, and you'll see the best of it uploaded here every so often, in the months -- years! -- to come.