Cirque 2 Sea Day 9 : 09-08-2016

The Bert Nichols Hut is the newest one on the famous Overland Track walk. It's quite enormous.  The old hut that it replaced was called Windy Ridge Hut. Sleeping there last night, besides me, were seven walkers who have come down from the Cradle Mountain end of the national park. They were all visiting from overseas or other parts of Australia and caught the ferry to finish their walk this afternoon. This part of the upper catchment is a wilderness area and tourism, and maybe a bit of scientific study, is about the only human activity up here. But as we've seen, plenty of animals call it home.

As I walked south down to Narcissus Hut I spotted something interesting beside the track. A mystery tail! The owner of this tail has been killed in the past day or two by another animal. What animal does the tail belong to and who might the predator be? Sorry to be gruesome but in the wild this is the way of things for most animals. Looking out for food to eat and trying to avoid being the food of something else. My food, on a less bloody note, has been mostly rolled oats, sultanas, cup a soups, sesame wheat and peanut butter.

Alex is bringing up the pack raft I'll be using tomorrow and I've decided to walk around Lake St Clair to meet him in the afternoon. Over the last nine days we've done a big loop and are heading back to where we started. Looking at the photos and the reports you can begin to see what the uppermost part of this river system looks like. Wild, wet, rocky, clean, vegetated... wonderful.

We've had some great questions today and I thought it might be worth sharing some of the answers to some of them:

Jack from Westerway Primary asked, 'How many ml of rain has fallen since you began your journey?'

The Bureau of Meteorology has a great website with heaps of information including rainfall. If you go to http://www.bom.gov.au/watl/rainfall/observations/index.shtml you can find out the answer to Jacks question (hint: I am in the North West region and around the Derwent Bridge area).

Puppylove asked, 'on an average day how fast do you think the Derwent River flows?'

The Hydro has a great link to this:

http://www.hydro.com.au/water/water-flow-and-levels

Every week day we have a Cirque to Sea t-shirt to give away, plus most week days a prize from the Royal Life Saving Society, these include: swimming caps, bathers, goggles, beach towels, toy ducks (soft ones and one's for the bath), and for one lucky person $160 worth of swimming lessons!! So get posting to be in the running.

T-shirt winner: Krazy.Kiarah

Royal Life Saving Society Winner: Jack from Westerway Primary

Cirque 2 Sea is a partnership project between the Bookend Trust, the Derwent Estuary Program and our supporters.