Southern Forests
Giant Marri Trees
If you haven’t been down this area of W.A. before then it’s kind of hard to describe just how amazingly beautiful it is. The landscape is green, not quite like home but green nevertheless and the trees beggar belief. The Marri, Karri, Jarrah and Tingle trees that live only in this small area of south west W.A. are incredible. Some of them are over 80m tall!
In Pemberton there is a lootout tree called the Gloucester tree. It is a loofout platform atop a giant Marri tree. Some nutter climbed almost to the top, then knocked the top of the tree 60m above the ground so they could build a platform on it. They used the platofrms as lookouts to see approaching bushfires. Helicopters and planes have made them largely obsolete but sometimes when the wind is too strong they are used again. To get to the top a series of spikes are nailed into the tree which you climb up like a ladder. In places on the Gloucester tree it is near vertical. About 2/3 the way up you can see the people below looking very small indeed but by the time you get the the top you’re above the canopy and can’t really see the ground. Thats probably a good thing for anyone afraid of heights. I expected to feel some movement but the thing is rock solid even in breezy conditions. The trunk was still over a metre in diameter right at the top though.
Riding through the twisty winding roads through the forests was amazing. I felt even smaller in the shadows of these giants than I did when I was just a speck on the horizon of the outback desert. The trees are so incredibly enormous, even road trains are only about half as long as some of these trees are high. The Marri and the Giant Redwood in California are the tallest tress in the world, there is some debate about which is the bigger but they are both frickin huge!