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Outside Magazine, June 2005

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The Hard Way
Bush Bashing (cont.)

AS I BALANCED ON MY BELLY atop a trapeze of ropy branches ten feet above the boggy ground, my pack suddenly slips over my head and I plunge forward. Midfall, my ankles miraculously hook in the slingshot-shaped crook of a leatherwood limb. I swing upside down for a few seconds, snared, before the bough breaks and I drop onto my head.

Success! I have circumvented a nasty patch of stinging nettles. I get up and continue pushing through the fray.

This ancient woodland is nothing like a typical rainforest, which has a lush canopy, a luxuriant understory, and a permanently shaded, relatively open forest floor. Here the dominant trees, mature regnans, stand 50 yards apart and rise as smooth and straight and pale as the Washington Monument. The floor receives abundant sunshine and rain and thus supports a healthy plant community, including 25-foot-deep briar patches.

"Over here!" Matt shouts. I follow his voice, zigzagging inside a matrix of biodiversity so dense I can't take more than three steps in one direction.

He's standing near the base of another enormous eucalyptus. Beside it, he looks

What changed me more was the macabre graveyards of the clear-cuts. Charred logs lay like corpses across a battlefield.

like a Lilliputian leaning on the foot of a one-legged giant: Its buttress roots grip the soil like prehensile toes; its leg, blistered with burls the size of bathtubs, rises six stories into the sky before molding into a slim torso. Another 10 to 15 stories up, limbs with twisted elbows sprout out.

"A noble creature, eh?" yells Matt joyously. "How tall you reckon she is?"

"Taller than Gandalf's Staff."

"Think?"

Matt and I drove into the Styx Valley two days ago and spent our first night at the Global Rescue Station, a volunteer eco-commune. In late 2003, determined to stop the destruction of ancient trees, the Wilderness Society and Greenpeace erected a base camp beside a fresh old-growth clear-cut. Choosing Gandalf's Staff, a 270-foot regnans, as their mascot, they suspended three platforms from the tree, 200 feet above the ground. For five months, volunteers living in these precarious nests beamed out SOS messages via satellite, and Gandalf's Staff was spared from chainsaws.

There were a dozen volunteers at the base camp the night we arrived: bell-bottomed Japanese college students, dreadlocked Aussies, granola girls with nose rings. Penniless but passionate, they were clearing foliage and building trails to the colossal trees.

"The forest is so dodgy and dense and slick, we're putting in tracks to give ordinary people a chance to get close to the big trees," said camp coordinator Peter "Peck" Firth, a 20-year-old grape grower from Western Australia who's been working in the Styx for 14 months, without pay, to save what's left. "We want people to come here and feel their beauty and presence and sacredness. When you've been in this forest and stood beside these trees, they change you."

What changed me more was the macabre graveyards of the clear-cuts. Peck drove us to the start of our bushwalk, through an apocalyptic scene: Charred logs lay like corpses across a battlefield; blackened stumps sat among funeral pyres of unmarketable trees.

Clear-cut logging in the Styx Valley is a four-step process. After all trees in a selected area are felled, the straightest and most easily transported are removed. Everything else—an astonishing stockpile of lumber—is left as waste. Eucalyptus seedlings require fire for regeneration, so logging contractors spray jellied petroleum (also known as napalm), igniting the debris and creating hazy plumes of smoke. Next, the area is sown with regnans and other native hardwood seeds, and any animals—wallabies, wombats, and possums—that might eat seedlings are fenced out, trapped, or shot. (Until recently, the controversial practice of scattering poisoned carrots was used to kill the animals.) The trees are harvested after 80 years—two centuries before Eucalyptus regnans reaches maturity.

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