After a crazy Sunday night stranded over 1200m above sea-level at the summit of Mt. Roland, relaxation was not quite what I came away with.

I flew into Launceston on Thursday night, and was met at the airport by Melissa and her mother, Danielle, who I got to meet for the very first time! Melissa looked gorgeous, as always, and we drove for about an hour or so to her house, at Hawley House near Devonport. We got all of our stuff up into our room, exchanged some small talk with Melissa’s family, and hit the sack.

On Saturday, in between hanging out at Hawley’s Gingerbread House, we headed out to Sheffield and Latrobe with a family friend of the Houghtons, Richard Davies, in his Lexus. We stopped in Latrobe to visit this store, which was unlike any I’ve ever seen. Twenty or so rooms packed solid with novelties and bric-a-brac, and by solid, I mean solid. We had a few drinks at the Sheffield Hotel, on the main street of Sheffield. Sheffield is a little rural town best known for it’s collection of murals, and it is situated near Mt. Roland.

On Sunday, we decided to spend the afternoon by returning to Mt. Roland and exploring the beautiful forest surrounds, and by climbing to the top to watch the sunset. We had a look at the map of the park, and saw that we were looking at a 5 hour return journey. We arrived at 1300, so factoring in half an hour to enjoy the view, we figured that we would arrive back at Kings Road (near the foot of the face of the mountain) by about 1800, whilst we still had some light left for the descent.

We spent 3.5 hours on the southern track, walking first along a jeep track until we crossed O’Neill’s Creek, and started climbing. The track was steep in parts, but relatively easy-going. When we reached the saddle, we found a gentle sloping alpine plateau that runs along between the peaks of Mt. Roland, Mt. Claude and Mt. Van Dyke. There was some work in progress on creating a wooden walkway through the buttongrass on the plateau, and this provided some good relief from the otherwise very stony and uneven track. The track was littered with patches of snow that had not melted with the previous fall, and we ate some of the snow for refreshment.

We eventually reached the summit of Mt. Roland at about 1630. The views from the mountain were absolutely astonishing. Unfortunately, my camera batteries had died at O’Neill’s Creek, so we were forced to commit the view to memory alone, but thankfully, it is a view I may never forget. I’ve seen many sunsets, all over Australia and Asia, and it would rank as one of the most beautiful I’d ever seen, and reminded me of the sunsets I’ve seen in the Blue Mountains, in New South Wales. The haze of a cloudy horizon shone golden rays of light on the peaks of the surrounding mountain ranges, and the Great Western Tiers. The sky above us was clear and blue, and the clouds were lined with a golden fringe. The mountains around us were peaked in snow from recent falls, and the snow shone under the setting sun. It was gorgeous, and well worth the long walk up the mountain. At the time, I bemoaned the fact my camera batteries (both of them, in fact) had died at O’Neill’s Creek, but I later thought to myself that perhaps this was for the best, as Melissa and I now have a beautiful scene in our minds, kept for the both of us alone. Also, as it would later prove, this was a blessing in disguise, as a functioning camera would have surely kept me at the summit for an hour or more.

We guessed that we had perhaps an hour left of good light. We decided to attempt Kings Track, which runs down the face of the mountain, and although was reportedly very steep and difficult, was well marked and estimated at an hour to descend the entire track. This would have us back at the road by nightfall. Boy, how we were wrong!

We walked to the edge of the cliff near Mt. Roland’s summit, which is 1233m above sea level, and followed the track over the cliff and down an extremely steep track littered with massive boulders that we had to scale and clamber over to get down the track. We hadn’t gone 250 metres when we found that it was too dark to see, and we subsequently lost the track, finding ourselves in thick bush. It was too steep to turn back and safely retrace our steps, and realising perhaps for the first time that we were totally stranded, we were faced with a very scary choice: attempt to find a dry shelter and cuddle up for the night, or continue on through very dense forest, in complete darkness, for at least a kilometre straight down the cliff-face and at least a few kilometres from the base.

We chose to press on through the bush.

From our vantage point on the cliff, we could see across almost the entire Sheffield area, to Devonport and the Rubicon River (where Melissa lives), and Bass Strait. We were so high up we could basically see the entire northern coast. We picked out a twin set of lights closest to the base of the mountain, assuming/hoping it was an occupied farm house, and resolved to fix our navigation to that point, and aim straight for it.

It is very difficult to fully convey our experience. We were effectively blinded, so it would be like going on a 5 kilometre hike through the forest, with no track, down an average-70-degree drop, blindfolded. We could slightly make out the whitest of rocks, and a few plants such as lichen, and we were fortunate in that we had clear star-lit skies overhead, but once we got further into the undergrowth all light was shut out. We could only barely make out our obstacles as shadows, and this was intermittently successful: we bumped into and stumbled over almost every single tree, rock, log, branch and fern we came past. We traveled most of the way down the cliff on our backsides, to minimise the danger of falling off as much as we could.

I was sliding down a rather large boulder, on my backside, when the next thing I know Melissa was talking to me, saying “Ryan?! Ryan?!! Wake up! Come on….”, and I was laying face down on a rock. I had apparently fallen, hit my head on the rock as I fell, and been knocked unconscious. Melissa reckons I had been out for perhaps 20-30 seconds. I didn’t know it at the time, but I had obtained a mild concussion, and as I continued down the mountain I felt increasingly dizzy and disoriented. I fell more and more as we went on, sometimes face first, sometimes onto my back, but mostly by falling through holes and missing footholds. My legs were cut up and scratched, as were my hands and back. Every tree or branch I reached out for snapped, but every tree or branch I fell upon held steady and solid! Melissa went ahead of me, and managed to find almost every foothold. I managed to completely miss almost every foothold! We both had a very rough time of it.

Needless to say, I had long ago blown away any chance of being the “tough, rugged Aussie male”…

I slipped down a lot of logs and boulders, and kept rolling my right ankle. At the bottom of one particular fall, I had a small boulder roll right over my leg! Another time I got my foot stuck, and when I pulled on it my exhausted calf muscle seized up, and it was incredibly painful as I could not dislodge my foot. I had to wait for the pain to subside, and then work to dislodge my boot from the stone.

At one point further down, I had fallen onto my backside, and as I lay there, very dizzy from the concussion, I felt kind of giddy and lethargic, and I remember thinking that I didn’t care anymore, I wanted to just give up and go to sleep, right where I lay. This was obviously a symptom of my concussion, and Melissa was a godsent angel in that she maintained her resolve throughout the entire ordeal, and helped me down the mountain every step of the way. She’d never been there before either, and was just as scared as I, but she kept her chin up, kept her eye on the lights at the base, and kept us alive and relatively uninjured.

We eventually stumbled over a log, and found ourselves on a gravel and dirt “jeep track”. Hallelujah! we shouted… It was hard to see where the track took us, but our spirits soared as we hobbled painfully down the track. We came across a little caravan, which was unfortunately uninhabited, but we found a little shack about 500 metres on. It was 2100. We had been going at it for four hours since leaving the summit. We knocked on the door, covered in mud with twigs and assorted forest paraphernalia sticking out of our clothing and hair. In short, we looked a total mess. A nice young bloke by the name of Ben Hill opened the door, and agreed to drive us down to our motorbike, situated back at the car park at O’Neill’s Track, on the other side of the mountain. We first had some tea and met his wife, Michelle. Both Ben and Michelle were fantastically hospitable, especially given the time of night and the fact they had two very young children asleep in their beds, and we promised to send them much gratitude and presents!

When we got back to the O’Neill’s carpark, we searched in the scrub for the motorbike-riding gear we had hidden earlier, and this took about 20 minutes. Adding to a nightmare evening, we couldn’t get the motorbike to start, and pushed it about a kilometre down the road before the engine finally roared to life. We thanked Ben for his help and took off on the hour/hour-and-a-half or so journey back to Hawley House, via McDonald’s in Devonport. We certainly looked a sight walking into McDonalds covered in mud and twigs, and left twigs, leaves and ferns all over the restaurant! I ate a Big Mac, three large fries and an apple pie. I was starving!

We finally got home to Hawley, got to sleep about 0100, and awoke at 0400 for the hour’s drive back to Launceston to catch my flight. I farewelled the beautiful Melissa, and flew home to Melbourne. I then proceeded directly to the office to start work!

So, after a weekend of relaxation and enjoyment of Tasmania’s food and scenery, plus a little adventure to perhaps tell the grandchildren about, we are safe but sore, not dead but exhausted, and we have both resolved to maintain a healthier respect for the dangers of nature, and be better prepared for any future expeditions…