Walk in the Clouds.

My third week at CVA took me to Paluma.  Paluma is a mountain northwest of Townsville.  You can reach the small village area after driving on an 18 km windy road which was developed in the 1930’s.  Paluma has an elevation of ~1000 m, so Townsvillians will visit the cooler Paluma area for a break from the summer heat.  Because Paluma is a mountain, it receives the rain that would have hit Townsville (due to the geography, Townsville is an isolated dry tropical area, whereas most surrounding areas are in the wet tropics).  The village can often be inside a cloud, hence their recommendation to “take a walk in the clouds.”

All this extra rain means that Paluma has a rainforest!  Our job this week involved maintenance on the walking trails through the rainforest.  Again, we were working with some QPWS rangers.  Given the density of a rainforest, it is very easy to get lost there.  One of the rangers also does emergency rescue, and he told us how several missing persons from previous years still have yet to be found.  Therefore, it is important to have well-maintained trails so visitors can safely experience a rainforest.  Paluma has an environmental education centre where visiting schoolkids have hands-on lessons in the rainforest.  To accommodate all ages, there are a few trails of different lengths, but all are relatively short.  We started work on the 580 m Rainforest Trek.

Cyclone Yasi also hit Paluma, knocking down many trees.  While the trees have been cleared and bridges repaired, all that extra work meant more wear and tear on the walking surface of the trail.  Decomposed granite (“de-co”) serves as the trail floor.  It has high clay content, so it hardens up after rain.  Our job was to beef up the weakened areas, especially the water bars (a.k.a. “whoa-boys”), with de-co.  We would break up the de-co piles at the trail heads with mattocks (pick axes), transport the de-co along the trail, and shape the loose de-co into the form we needed.  The rangers would later pack it down with a machine called a whackapacker.

We camped at the bottom of Paluma by Big Crystal Creek, which has some beautiful swimming holes.  We made some s’mores one night.  Apparently, graham crackers either don’t exist or are very hard to come by in Australia.  I have been told that American s’mores are better than Aussie s’mores, but once I find some vegan marshmallows, I’ll have to give the Aussie s’more a try.