Pandani Grove Nature Walk, Tasmania
Wander the Pandani Grove Nature Walk around Lake Dobson in the Mount Field National Park and walk with survivors.
At 1031 metres above sea level, the lake is swept by icy gales in winter and surrounded by snow for weeks at a time. Only plants and animals with special adaptations can live through the cold, then adjust to summer sun warming clear mountain air to temperatures that make boulders hot to the touch.
The sub-alpine environment is about 70 minutes drive from Hobart, in Tasmania’s south. Leave the car park at Lake Dobson for the 40-minute circuit walk, through families of squat plants that huddle together in groups and tall heath plants, interspersed with Tasmanian snow gums. Around the lake, native pencil pines are hardy Christmas tree look-alikes.
The gravel track surface changes to duckboarding as you enter the pandanis, which are among the tallest heaths in the world and capable of reaching 12 metres high. In fact the pandanis, with a bushy crown of long narrow leaves, eventually grow too big for their own good and topple over.
Huge boulders in the grove were dumped by a kilometre-wide glacier that began south of Lake Dobson and stretched for 15 kilometres, before the big melt at the end of the Ice Age about 18,000 years ago.
Around the track, keep an ear out for the mating call of male frogs – cricket noises from the brown tree frog, the quacking duck sounds of the Tasmanian tree frog or the odd call of a lamb bleating that is the sign of a Tasmanian froglet. And in a national park, a long way from anywhere, the creak of a rusty door hinge means you’ve been tricked by a brown froglet.
Your nose will let you know when you’re nearing end of the track, with the unmistakeable smell of a thicket of lemon-scented boronia near the bridge. It’s the leaves that carry the scent so you can enjoy it year-round.
Most of the animals that live here are nocturnal so you’ll only see them when they’re feeding after dusk. Larger animals like wallabies – sometimes seen in the day – and possums can tolerate the cold. But smaller mammals hibernate, like the pygmy possums or marsupial mice that live under the snow. If you wait quietly, you may spy a platypus moving out of its burrow to swim in the lake.
Tasmania has a host of great short walks that take you for a seaside ramble, a long day’s outing in ancient rainforest, a short mountain climb for stunning coastal views, along a World Heritage riverbank or into vast cave systems.
© Breakloose Publications. Unauthorised use or reproduction prohibited. Editorial provided courtesy of Tourism Tasmania.