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Outside Magazine, June 2005

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The Hard Way
Bush Bashing (cont.)

MATT AND I started our bushwalk at the edge of another clear-cut, this one beside Diogenes Creek, a small tributary of the Styx. Diogenes was a fourth-century-b.c. Greek cynic who eschewed material wealth and rejected government, reputation, and convention, focusing instead on moral self-mastery. He was nicknamed "the Dog" by Aristotle and is said to have walked in vain across Greece searching for an honest man.

We spent that first day picking our

The going was so slow that we covered less than 500 yards an hour. But we were among the titans, and that was all that mattered.

way through an unspoiled swath of forest on the north side of the Styx. At natural openings, we could see cadaverous clear-cuts across the river. We made five miles in seven hours before deciding to camp. The forest floor was impossible for a tent, so we waded out to a rocky island in the middle of the Styx and pitched up there.

In the morning, we continued our tour of the wildest forest I've ever explored. We were climbing as often as walking. It was a literal jungle gym.

At one point, while pulling himself up onto a ten-foot-thick gangplank, Matt looked over his shoulder at me and proudly said, "Now, this is true bush! It's not made for man."

Often the going was so slow that we covered less than 500 yards an hour. But we were among the titans, and that was all that mattered. We had no way of measuring the trees, but we guessed that some of them were larger than anything yet discovered in Tasmania.

By the morning of the third day, we'd passed back into the land of clear-cuts.

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