Caldyanup Diaries #2

Today feels firey and snaky. First day back since the crew put fire in around the mountain, then a few days of rain. Now it’s hot and windy and low humidity. Fire weather. There are smokes all around me from the proscribed burn – bravo one one ones – light, columns and blue. I radio them in as several and give bearings on smokes close to the boundary. 

 

The smokes spire into the sky through the emerald crowns of karri trees. From the tower a colony of sixty-metre-high trees looks like shrubbery but more uniform, as they stand in serried ranks, crown shy of their neighbours. It’s only when I rest my binoculars on a single karri atop Little Caldyanup about five hundred metres to the north, that their enormity becomes real.

So many climbers up here today … tourists, families young and old with their selfie sticks, mobile phones and bottles of water. Their heavy panting announces their arrival at the top of the stairs. Five-year old kids rip up the mountain, leaving their parents to straggle with a lifetime of sins on the concrete stairs.

They are often amazed to see someone in the tower and that the fire tower still operates. Once they have recovered the questions begin. Do you come up here every day? (Yes, when rostered on.) How do you get up here? (Helicopter ha ha. No, the same way you do.) Are you alone? (Ew.) How high are we? (About four twenty metres, so not officially a mountain.) Do you bring your lunch? (Yes.) What are you doing? (Watching for weather and smokes that aren’t where they should be.)

Sometimes I hide when the feeling of being an exhibit becomes too much. Even checking the wind speed on the little kestrel device draws the hushed whisper; maybe she’s a scientist. Then there are the nudist posers. Oh God. It’s a thing. The social media craze that began on Bluff Knoll has migrated to Caldyanup. It’s the only time I’m quite uncomfortable holding a pair of binocs.

A woman just brought up her beagle! I would make a terrible park ranger what with compliance and all, but I just couldn’t let this one slip. I waited while she examined a phone photo taken by a Dutch tourist of a ‘very big, dangerous Australian snake.’

She nodded and said, ‘yep that’s a dugite alright.’ I asked her if she could please take her dog off the mountain and out of the national park, and she was really good! So glad. I patted the dog and asked her how she got it up the two ladders. ‘Oh, she’s an absolute champ,’ she said. ‘She did it all on her own.’