Mt. Crawford Forest
In the state forest at Mt. Crawford there are perhaps a million trees grown for timber, but it is also a pine-scented playground for people. On Postcards this week, I took a walk in the green forest which attracts bush-walkers, cyclists, horse-riders, fossickers and campers four-seasons round. Some have a special love for winter among the trees, and I found out why during our expedition.
First, however, to the top of Tower Hill for a look at where Mt. Crawford sits in the landscape....and with permission to climb the firetower, I took in a magnificent three-sixty degree panorama.
Mt. Crawford forest has about an hour's drive north of Adelaide, at the northern end of the Mt. Lofty Ranges just before they join the Barossa Range. I could see the Barossa Valley in a haze in the distance.
The forest itself spread about ten kilometres to the east, and the patchwork revealed big stands of native scrub amongst the thousands of hectares of Pinus Radiata. Dotted through the forest are camping grounds and picnic spots and even an official mineral fossicking zone.
Mt. Crawford has meant timber for a long time. Redgum from the area last century went into the Port Adelaide wharves and the Port Railway line. James Crawford was an overlander in the early days of colonial South Australia, and he set up a hut camp at the base of the sugar-loaf shaped hill for his cattle en route from NSW. There was a little township before the forest was declared and first planted in the early 1900's. A pretty church ruin stands in testimony.
The campfire season begins in May, and the Postcards crew soon found three young lads using the Chalks hut with the fireplace roaring. Camping is so popular with groups and families that the forest authorities have just built the new and expansive "Cromers Shed" to provide a central facility at a well used campsite. Several kilometres north, we recorded some pretty vision of the Old School House, used extensively by school groups for forest excursions. It is now deep in the pine plantations, but was once approached through an avenue of mighty oaks.
It was a surprise to come across a batch of fenced off mineshafts in a native forest reserve. This is fossicker territory, and they're proving there's still gold in these hills. A finger-sized nugget found recently was worth about a thousand dollars, and we ran across a seriously equipped fossicker, Dave Ashby, who tipped a fingernail-sized find into his palm to show us.
He works with his detector round Watt's Gully. Remarkably John Watts and three fellow diggers kept a strike quiet for a whole year until news got out and they were joined by hundreds of miners in a local goldrush. You will need a 2-per day permit to follow in their footsteps. While we were shooting, Flinders University student Wayne Bartsch, tried looking for old coins round the mullock heaps. He accompanied our Postcards journey through the forest, having provided valuable research as part of his Cultural Tourism Degree course.
He is an occasional visitor to the forest and so he wasn't so surprised to see so many gray kangaroos. They watched us from open paddocks near picnic grounds and along forest firetracks. There are also feral deer in several patches of forest, and we scored some good shots for "Morc", our Postcards editor, to slip into the show.
Our guide all day was Mt Crawford Forest Ranger, Vanessa Geerks. And her turn to appear on television came late in the day as we headed for a section of the Mawson Trail that runs through her domain. (The Heysen Trail for bushwalkers and also snakes through the forest on the way to the Barossa Valley).
An enthusiastic trailbike rider, Vanessa kindly loaned me her husbands classy mountainbike, and we pedalled our way down the bike-friendly track and talked about the recreational side of this pine plantation forest. It's well used by walkers, riders and campers all year round, and fortunately there are some signposts, because there are more than eight hundred kilometres of tracks through Mt. Crawford.
"There's a big winter program of events, including several dog-sled races", Vanessa told me. The husky events are spectacular, as we saw in a previous Postcards when Lisa McAlister watched some teams tear through a forest. Vanessa also tipped us off to a big picnic and family event coming up on Adelaide Cup Day (May 15). The Birdwood Farm Day is held in the forest.
There are modest permit fees for camping, hut bookings, horse-riding and fossicking in the forest. The picnics and attractive walks through the rolling landscape of pines and shrubs are free, and the rangers only ask that you observe the forest code. About 100,000 people each year already enjoy the Mt. Crawford Forest. I hope you get a chance to go green with them sometime soon.
Details:
Mt. Crawford Forest Reserve
Williamstown. SA 5351
Information Centre
8km from Williamstown along the Warren Road
Open everyday 9.00am to 11.00am
Phone: 08-8524-6004
Fax: 08-8524-6611
www.forestry.sa.gov.au
e-mail: forestry.recreation@saugov.auBrochures available on:
Mt. Crawford Forest
Horse-riding
Fossicking
Camping
