photographer Don Defenderfer

As I write, it was 40 years ago today that a young woman came up to me while I was sitting by a warm fire on a rainy day at Cradle Mountain Lodge, and asked, “What are you reading?”

We began talking, as travellers do, and within minutes she asked me to join her and a couple of friends to journey around Tasmania in their rented car. I accepted, of course. It seemed like a great opportunity to see the island that I had just arrived on a few days earlier. I had planned on hiking through the park on the Overland Track, but it was pouring rain, and the choice to hike in the wet or join a group of fellow travellers was not a hard decision to make.

Forty years later I am standing by the same hearth, feeling the same warmth, and I am reliving that moment with the woman I met here, with whom I have been ever since. As we gaze into the embers we are thinking, what kind of fate or destiny or blind luck was it that a bushwalker from Alaska and a girl from Adelaide would happen to meet in a remote location in the Tasmanian wilds and then spend the rest of their lives together? As we sipped a good drink, we thought how lucky we were to be able to return to this place, to the day, four decades later, to the exact place we met. It all seemed a bit twilight zone-ish – why did it happen , the chance meeting, and why were we back here today in the same place. Is love and fate ordained or just random? Do we create our destiny or does it create us? Is there purpose out there or is life just blind luck?

. . .

We met a young couple sitting by the fire and they said they were newlyweds. We told them our story and the new bride welled up in tears. She hoped they could come back here too, like us, half a lifetime later, still together, still hiking and travelling.

Forty years ahead must have seemed like an impossible concept for them, and yet to us the past was still as palpable as the present. I could smell and taste and hear the past as if it were here living today.

As we chatted by the fire, it seemed like no time at all had passed. It was still 1982 and we were both young and free-spirited. Time is like that; it really has no fixed boundaries beyond seasons and the globe spinning and circling around the sun. I felt I could still choose to find a group of young travellers and cruise around Tasmania or to take a hike in the wilderness. The choice was still there in my imagination.

But this time I decided – we decided – that we had long ago made our choice and now it was time to take a hike. It was a good decision.

Hiking around to the back of Cradle Mountain to Lake Rodway and Scott-Kilvert Hut has to be one of Tasmania’s great day hikes. On a clear crisp autumn morning we set out on the hike, starting at Dove Lake where we gazed in wonder at the wall of dark and jagged mountains that rise sharply and decisively up from the lake’s black and blue waters. The castle fortress of mountains in front of us gave me the same feeling as they did when I first saw them,  – still dark and mysterious, wild and primordial, like one has suddenly walked back to the Pleistocene and giant wombat-like creatures with tusks were there to be seen dipping their snouts in the lake.

The timelessness of the mountains has not changed. Their rocks are an unfathomable 170 million years old. One feels one is entering a time machine in the Tasmanian wilderness, suddenly taken back to a place that hasn’t been humanised, is totally natural, and is still evolving and creating itself after epochs of continental breakup, volcanics and glaciers.

Quietly walking into the bush, one is soon immersed in the present, in the flourishing beauty and soothing spirit of nature. The spirit is seductive, optimistic and inspirational. It is a feeling like coming home – and that this is how we are meant to feel – with our hearts at rest.

The distractions of the real world, of bills and electronics and newsfeeds and politicians, all seem beside the point and meaningless when one is in the mountains. Nature puts life into proper perspective.

I instantly felt rejuvenated, to again be marinated in the natural world. All things seemed possible and life was good and plentiful.

But of course we know that life is toil and life is tough, and plenty can vanish quickly – with the snap of one’s fingers. So that is why walking into the natural world can be so redeeming – it inspires us to focus on the good and possible, not the bad and bleak.

We left the lake track and hiked up the steep slope toward Hansen’s Peak. Our easy walk got harder as the path steepened and soon we were relying on a series of chain cables to help pull us up through steep chutes. With a few grunts and groans (maybe I wasn’t quite as fit as the 24-year-old I was before) we pulled ourselves up, and eventually arrived on Hansen Peak’s flanks, on the saddle, with dramatic views of Lake Hanson below us to the east and the fluted dolerite columns of Cradle Mountain straight in front of us.

We walked past the area known as Twisted Lakes – small lakes surrounded by rocky slopes and beech trees and pencil pines. The lakes glistened in the pastel-blue morning light. Over the years we’ve seen all sorts of moods painted on these lakes and mountains – dark clouds on the spires, cold rain, fog, ice, snow, bitter wind, dark foreboding clouds and crystal clear air. All of these moods are beautiful, but one is always especially blessed to have sunny weather at Cradle Mountain and we appreciated the good luck we had in striking a clear autumn day.

After meeting the confluence of the Face Track, which crosses under Cradle Mountain, we followed the trail south around the side and back of the mountain on a path that journeys through a tough but delicate landscape that was designed by the ultimate gardener, nature. The track winds in and out of stately pencil pines, yellow flowering banksias and scrubby deciduous myrtle forests, down towards Lake Rodway and into bush with larger trees, including snow gums and the magnificent King Billy pines.

We hiked and paused at the trackside rock pools – mini lakes that reflected the mountains and trees like a Monet – with one pond suitably named the Artists Pool. The pools consisted of whiskey-coloured waters garnished on the sides with coral ferns, soft moss and green and red fungi, mountain rocket, waratah and scoparia heath. Weather-worn King Billy pines and the mountain were reflected in the waters for all artists to appreciate and wax lyrical about. The back of Cradle framed the scene, rising gallantly into a rocky fortress behind the lakes.

It was indeed the ultimate garden design. I could have lingered there all day.

We had a skinny dip at Lake Rodway and lunch at Scott-Kilvert Hut (named for a teacher and student who died on this walk in a blizzard in May, 1965). The lake water was ice-cold but felt good and left us tingling for hours afterward. After lunch we dreamed off in front of the hut, lying on our backs, closing our eyes and listening to the wobbling cackles of the cockatoos and screeching black currawongs; listening to the bees humming, while honeyeaters, thornbills and scrubtits were sing-songing. A gentle rise of an alpine wind sifted through the pines around us. Water trickled down a creek. Opening our eyes, we watched clouds metamorphosing across the deep blue sky, creating one-off artistic architectural achievements and then dissolving, disappearing into the ether.

It was a fine day to be alive, to dream off and walk to where we had camped those decades ago.

We hiked back and didn’t see a single person on the Lake Rodway track. All morning, too, we had seen no-one. It seems most people clamber up Marion’s Lookout on the other side of Dove Lake. And dare I say, 40 years later it seemed like nothing had changed from what it had been: no crowds and the world was ours alone to discover and appreciate and fall in love with.

. . .

Days later (after more inspirational walks around Cradle Mountain and another tingling swim – this time in Lake Wilkes which sits just below the Face Track), we had one last hike into remembrance country. We followed the paths that criss-cross near Cradle Mountain Lodge – the Pencil Pine, King Billy and Speeler tracks. Here, amazingly, just a short walk from the lodge, one can walk into an enchanted world of enormous beech and King Billy pine trees. Here one can walk into a remnant of Gondwana, where ancients tower above and, in deep shadows, thick mosses coat the rocks and trees and ground like the textures of a dream in a dark and secluded netherworld.

We walked here daily 40 years ago – the girl I met had got a job at the lodge as a cook and I lived in a dome tent by the side of the Pencil Pine Creek and each day we walked in these woods as she planned her menu and we planned where to travel next. As we walked again we thought about the past and how timeless it seemed to be here again – here we were walking and marvelling at the same trees and we were feeling just as enchanted, just as humbled, by the beauty as before.

As we walked we remembered the Cradle Mountain Lodge owners back then, the pioneers Ossie and Alec Ellis. Like Gustav Wiendorfer, they had a vision for hikers to come and enjoy the wilds here. They were kind folk and welcomed my camping nearby and hanging out at the lodge, waiting for the cook to get off work. As we walked today we started to pass a couple dressed in woollen pants, flannel shirts and worn old hats. They looked like they belonged in these parts. We struck up a conversation. And, oh yes, they had been coming here for many years, since 1972, well before us, and they were good friends with Ossie and Alec and their brother Mort. They said Mort had lived nearby, just below the lodge in a little cabin, and had only died a few years ago at age 98. (Evidently the brothers were still so active at the time of their passing that they “had died with their boots on”.)

After a good chinwag, we left them, and I again pondered fate. What are the chances of meeting this couple, on this track today, who knew the old days of the lodge and the friends we had made here nearly two generations ago? What is it about these dark glades that creates these kind of haunting coincidences? And I thought, maybe coincidences are not just random, they matter, they give life structure and meaning. We walked back to our campsite reflecting on the confluences of the past days, still feeling like time travellers in a twilight zone.

We slept that night in our dome tent – identical to the one I lived in and we slept in 40 years ago. We went to sleep contentedly. The trees around us and the tent felt like home and my heart beat peacefully. There is no place like dome.

Don Defenderfer is a native of San Francisco who once went on a holiday to Alaska where he met an Australian who told him to visit Tasmania. So he did, and while here he met a woman. He was state coordinator for Landcare for many years, a job that allowed him to be inspired by not only the beauty of the Tasmanian landscape but by the many people that are trying to repair and renew it. He has a Masters Degree in Social Ecology and a Bachelor of Environmental Studies with a minor in writing. He has published three volumes of poetry, and his work has appeared in newspapers and periodicals, including The New York Times and The Australian. His book "Tasmania: An island dream", can be bought through the Forty South Bookshop.