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Destinations > Barrington Tops NP
Barrington Tops NP
Issue: January 2001
Words and photos by Peter Thoeming
The plane's twin engines sing contentedly in the cold, moist air, as relaxed in their nacelles as the pilot is tense in his cockpit seat. He is staring out into the featureless pure white of the icy cloud, his knuckles on the controls almost as white as the cloud, willing something to emerge from the deceptive cottonball blandness. And then something does, and he has no more than a fraction of a second, probably not even enough time to begin to pull back on his steering column, before the aircraft smashes into a stand of Antarctic beeches festooned with wreaths of frost.
The clouds briefly fight the blossoming flame and quickly win, dousing it and closing again. The mile-high peaks of Barrington Tops have claimed another aircraft, and another life.
In truth, nobody knows how many there have been. At least one aircraft is still missing somewhere in those cloud-shrouded hills, and according to some there may be as many as half a dozen.
Mount Barrington, Polblue Mountain and Carey's Peak wait on, wrapped in their cloud and speckled with snow and ice at almost any time of year. Most planes fly higher these days but there is still the occasional single-engine aircraft, helicopter or ultralight. Meanwhile there is other prey, lower down.
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Let's Be Careful Up There
That might seem like a rather over-dramatic introduction to a weekend's 4WDing but then Barrington Tops is a dramatic place. Originally a part of the Australian Agricultural Company's huge grant that covered the Hunter Valley - including Newcastle, which the company named - the Tops were first logged fairly thoroughly and rather crudely, then harvested more carefully. Large tracts were turned into state forests, although much of this area has now been dedicated as part of the park.
The Tops have regenerated spectacularly well, the original rainforest vegetation spreading from the areas saved from logging (often just by their inaccessibility) out into the nearly 40,000ha which now constitute the national park.
The Tops consist of two linked plateaus with a few remnant peaks. They are also known as 'bucketts', a corruption of an Aboriginal word meaning 'big rocks', and big rocks they are, especially as you view them from the Bucketts Way leading north to Gloucester. The Tops are alpine at their peaks, with a mixture of bogs, grasses and stands of the beautiful Antarctic beeches and snow gums. Further down there is temperate rainforest and wet and dry eucalyptus forest, ranging right down to subtropical rainforest in the sheltered gullies.
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Words and photos by Peter Thoeming
The plane's twin engines sing contentedly in the cold, moist air, as relaxed in their nacelles as the pilot is tense in his cockpit seat. He is staring out into the featureless pure white of the icy cloud, his knuckles on the controls almost as white as the cloud, willing something to emerge from the deceptive cottonball blandness. And then something does, and he has no more than a fraction of a second, probably not even enough time to begin to pull back on his steering column, before the aircraft smashes into a stand of Antarctic beeches festooned with wreaths of frost.
The clouds briefly fight the blossoming flame and quickly win, dousing it and closing again. The mile-high peaks of Barrington Tops have claimed another aircraft, and another life.
In truth, nobody knows how many there have been. At least one aircraft is still missing somewhere in those cloud-shrouded hills, and according to some there may be as many as half a dozen.
Mount Barrington, Polblue Mountain and Carey's Peak wait on, wrapped in their cloud and speckled with snow and ice at almost any time of year. Most planes fly higher these days but there is still the occasional single-engine aircraft, helicopter or ultralight. Meanwhile there is other prey, lower down.
read on below advertisement
Let's Be Careful Up There
That might seem like a rather over-dramatic introduction to a weekend's 4WDing but then Barrington Tops is a dramatic place. Originally a part of the Australian Agricultural Company's huge grant that covered the Hunter Valley - including Newcastle, which the company named - the Tops were first logged fairly thoroughly and rather crudely, then harvested more carefully. Large tracts were turned into state forests, although much of this area has now been dedicated as part of the park.
The Tops have regenerated spectacularly well, the original rainforest vegetation spreading from the areas saved from logging (often just by their inaccessibility) out into the nearly 40,000ha which now constitute the national park.
The Tops consist of two linked plateaus with a few remnant peaks. They are also known as 'bucketts', a corruption of an Aboriginal word meaning 'big rocks', and big rocks they are, especially as you view them from the Bucketts Way leading north to Gloucester. The Tops are alpine at their peaks, with a mixture of bogs, grasses and stands of the beautiful Antarctic beeches and snow gums. Further down there is temperate rainforest and wet and dry eucalyptus forest, ranging right down to subtropical rainforest in the sheltered gullies.
next page »
