"Survey lines" between Mt Sorell and Mt Darwin??

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"Survey lines" between Mt Sorell and Mt Darwin??

Postby headwerkn » Mon 21 Nov, 2022 12:52 pm

Wondering if anyone could shed some history/insight on the "interesting" survey (?) lines that run east-west across the Clark River valley between the Mt Sorell and Darwin Ridgelines.

IMG_9012.jpg


We thought they might have been tracks/pads, but I spoke with Bill W and he said they're actually raised furrows. Glad we didn't try returning to camp via them then ;-)

I'm guessing the area was the site of mineral surveying/prospecting at some point? Both the 'lines' as well as the actual tracks that still exist do look like they were drawn on a map first, rather than being cut to suit the terrain.

Also curious if anyone knows the story of what appears to be a reasonably fresh cut and tagged track that branches west off the Darwin ridgeline track closer to Mt Darwin itself? We didn't follow it very far (rain was coming in) but it did rather look like it was heading straight down to the Clark River. Not sure if someone's trying to create an alternate route to Mt Sorell.

IMG_9062.jpg


IMG_9064.jpg
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Re: "Survey lines" between Mt Sorell and Mt Darwin??

Postby north-north-west » Mon 21 Nov, 2022 3:38 pm

The survey liines are all due to mineral exploration, and there are far more of them than are shown on maps or are visible on the ground. The usual descent from the Darwin Plateau to the Clark River follows one.

As for that new track ... hmmmmn. When I did Darwin/Sorell there was a fairly newly cut and taped track descending from the SE corner of Darwin to the nearest vehicle track. Wonder if the same people are responsible for this western one.
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Re: "Survey lines" between Mt Sorell and Mt Darwin??

Postby Tortoise » Mon 21 Nov, 2022 9:42 pm

headwerkn wrote:We thought they might have been tracks/pads, but I spoke with Bill W and he said they're actually raised furrows. Glad we didn't try returning to camp via them then ;-)

The ones we used were definitely pad-like!
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Re: "Survey lines" between Mt Sorell and Mt Darwin??

Postby headwerkn » Tue 22 Nov, 2022 8:19 am

We used the 'usual' route NW off South Darwin Peak, a bit overgrown but still clearly cut and mostly marked for a surprising amount of the route. Evidence of another party going through maybe only a few weeks ago too.
Still a long day out though!
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Re: "Survey lines" between Mt Sorell and Mt Darwin??

Postby Paul » Tue 22 Nov, 2022 7:12 pm

We stumbled across one of those " Cut Line's " when we came off Mt Sorrell on our way to Mt Darwin South, when we walked from Coal Head to Ouse.

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Re: "Survey lines" between Mt Sorell and Mt Darwin??

Postby pazzar » Mon 26 Dec, 2022 8:54 pm

For those who have been out here recently - what is the condition of the road up to the plateau? Is it driveable in a 4wd, or too rutted out?
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Re: "Survey lines" between Mt Sorell and Mt Darwin??

Postby bumpingbill » Sat 31 Dec, 2022 9:21 pm

Just want to bump this - I'm also curious about road quality/access.

How far up the hill can you get from Kelly Basin Road?

Getting up onto the Darwin Plateau seems to save 400 or so meters of elevation.

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Re: "Survey lines" between Mt Sorell and Mt Darwin??

Postby headwerkn » Sun 01 Jan, 2023 8:54 pm

It's pretty rough, plenty of washouts, hollows and rock to break things on. I'll find some photos tomorrow...

If you've got a serious 4WD (lift, proper tyres etc) and are willing to use/risk it, then it is drivable to the top of the steep descent west of South Darwin Peak. Quad or dirt/mountain bike would be better, arguably. I didn't regret taking my non-lifted, winch-equiped 4WD ute for one second, once I saw it.

Lewi Taylor managed to get his SWB Jeep in but if memory serves correct, he managed to snap a steering or suspension component in the process. It also didn't save much time instead of just walking in.
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Re: "Survey lines" between Mt Sorell and Mt Darwin??

Postby bumpingbill » Sun 01 Jan, 2023 9:09 pm

So the ol' 2WD 2000s era Corolla that struggles over a mildly disused forestry road will be perfectly fine and more than adequate, is what I'm reading! :lol:
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Re: "Survey lines" between Mt Sorell and Mt Darwin??

Postby headwerkn » Mon 02 Jan, 2023 10:43 pm

I've done some extremely dumb things with Corollas offroad, but to paraphrase the late great Mr Loaf, I won't do that ;-)

Just went through my pics, no good ones of the bad washouts sorry.

_1310905.jpeg


Section immediately up from camp. Is about 4x steeper than it looks like in the photo. I fell over three times just trying to walk down it (admittedly in the dark, but still).

_1310922.jpeg


High point near Mt Darwin. There's a really bad 'dip' or three just beyond where the people are walking here.

_1310931.jpeg


Typical surface for a "good" section of track.

_1310940.jpeg


Steep descent towards the main road. The surface here is very loose, with plenty of big stones just waiting to jump up and smash your transfer case or diff housing.
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Re: "Survey lines" between Mt Sorell and Mt Darwin??

Postby danman » Tue 28 Feb, 2023 6:32 pm

north-north-west wrote:The survey liines are all due to mineral exploration, and there are far more of them than are shown on maps or are visible on the ground. The usual descent from the Darwin Plateau to the Clark River follows one.

As for that new track ... hmmmmn. When I did Darwin/Sorell there was a fairly newly cut and taped track descending from the SE corner of Darwin to the nearest vehicle track. Wonder if the same people are responsible for this western one.


I think i stumbled upon this track today. didn't follow it very far as it seemed be getting sketchier and going via south darwin cirque seemed an implausible way of getting to the summit.

Does this look like the track you were talking about (in orange)?
Image
did you follow it down to the vehicle track? looking at the terrain it seemed pretty vertical but i guess there are plenty of "implausible" tracks in Tassie.

Anyway, I was trying to work out why it was there. being at the northern end of the exploration track i assumed it related to minerals, but didn't seem to go towards anywhere you could fly a drill rig into. rock chip samples maybe?

Wikipedia (Not the best source) talks of being able to drive to the summit of Darwin in the 70s. Any truth to that? Doesn't look very likely from aerial images.

What is the normal route to the Darwin summit? The razorback spur looks logical but I didn't end up taking a look there.

In regards to the 4WD track, it doesn't seem too bad since the last time I went up there about 3 years ago in a pretty stock 4WD. On a wet day the slipperiness of the rock might make it a bit hairy. It only takes about 50 mins to an hour to walk up the track anyway.
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Re: "Survey lines" between Mt Sorell and Mt Darwin??

Postby north-north-west » Tue 28 Feb, 2023 7:09 pm

Yes, that's it and yes, I did follow it all the way to the vehicle track. There was one point where it got rather vague - I tried going right and it dead-ended, so then I went left and found a way down; that was the steepest bit. It wasn't as well marked just there as it could have been, but it improved below that and was a much quicker way of getting back to camp than the outward route along Razorback Spur (and a circuit is always better anyway).
I don't think it had anything to do with mineral exploration - it wasn't that many years ago - just walkers wanting a quicker way up/down.

Razorback is a great walk until you get up where Darwin flattens out and then it scrubs up. The only issue is whether the old vehicle tracks at the start get enough use to stop them getting too overgrown to follow.

I think driving to the summit would have been from the north? Can't see how either of the southern routes would be possible in a vehicle.
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Re: "Survey lines" between Mt Sorell and Mt Darwin??

Postby danman » Tue 28 Feb, 2023 7:48 pm

north-north-west wrote:Yes, that's it and yes, I did follow it all the way to the vehicle track. There was one point where it got rather vague - I tried going right and it dead-ended, so then I went left and found a way down; that was the steepest bit. It wasn't as well marked just there as it could have been, but it improved below that and was a much quicker way of getting back to camp than the outward route along Razorback Spur (and a circuit is always better anyway).
I don't think it had anything to do with mineral exploration - it wasn't that many years ago - just walkers wanting a quicker way up/down.

Razorback is a great walk until you get up where Darwin flattens out and then it scrubs up. The only issue is whether the old vehicle tracks at the start get enough use to stop them getting too overgrown to follow.

I think driving to the summit would have been from the north? Can't see how either of the southern routes would be possible in a vehicle.


Ok thanks, I did some more Googling and found that is the commonly used route it seems. I'll have to check it again, but perhaps drive up the first bit next time.

It's just interesting to me, clearly quite a lot of work hacking and slashing the route has been done (and it looks semi-recent) but by who and what was the motivation? A lot of unpaid labour with limited reward. Then again it's visible on aerial imagery, so maybe an old route someone made a project to re-open?

I didn't think Darwin would have much appeal to recreational walkers, it's not an Abel and is arguably a fair bit less "interesting" than the nearby Jukes. And most walkers who seek out obscure-ish peaks are of the leave no trace variety and wouldn't bother hacking a 1m wide track...

The last mineral exploration up that way was around 2018-19 I think. Maybe I'll see if I can find any of the reports about what they were doing up there..
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Re: "Survey lines" between Mt Sorell and Mt Darwin??

Postby farefam » Fri 17 Mar, 2023 12:55 am

The E-W survey lines, and a number of N-S linking survey lines were laid out as part of a large grid, primarily for exploration mapping and to a lesser extent to enable geophysical surveys if the mapping identified anything that looked interesting. I actually traversed a large number of those survey lines in the late spring and "summer" of 1991-1992 in my first stint as a geologist. That "summer" was in the time before climate change became so very apparent in Western Tasmania, as I distinctly remember that the weather was mostly cold and miserable on that thankless job. The leeches seemed to enjoy it though. At first we walked into the northern part of the grid in the valleys of the Thomas Currie Rivulet and the Garfleld River. But once that section was finished and as the daily walk in and out was becoming prohibitively long, in the second part of the "summer" we hired a helicopter to fly us into to the Clark Valley section of the grid. That was supposed to have been done on a daily basis for a couple of fortnight's. Unfortunately though, the low cloud in the area was so persistent that we lost many days just waiting at the Queenstown airport, looking south, before giving up and driving back to the exploration base at Zeehan. The team only flew into the Clark Valley just a few times before the horrendous expense and terrible productivity forced the use of helicopters to be abandoned for the rest of that season.

I do remember it was impressive one time to fly in close alongside the eastern cliffs of Mt Sorell. Another time I was running late for pickup and we had to try to run along the grid lines to reach the helicopter. That's not fun when you can't see where the helipad is hidden in the rainforest and scrub, yet it misleadingly sounds like it is parked idling just a stone's throw away. On that occasion the ex-military pilot decided to play about and did a sudden terrain hugging descent flying across the Sorell-Darwin saddle into the Clark Valley, which felt like it sent my stomach into my head. On one other occasion myself and a field assistant were dropped in by helicopter to a more remote part of the grid on the north side of Mt Sorell, intending to stay in a tent for a few nights then walk out. We did one day's good work but then It poured so much during the next day that we abandoned the mapping. We had to walk back out along an old mining tramway and the survey grid, to then cross the Garfield River so that we didn't get stranded there. It wasn't much fun crossing a big area of wind-felled forest and then having to strip off to our jocks to wade across the cold Garfield Rive; all the while carrying the heavy rock samples I had collected. Although I was only in my early days as a bushwalker, I felt reasonably comfortable with this "adventure", but my field assistant who had drawn the short straw was rather less so, and he made his views on that matter very clear. However, my field assistant did manage to maintain a cracking pace once we reached the 4WD track and he knew that salvation in the form of the warmth of the work vehicle was only another hour or so away! All in all it was a pretty unproductive "summer" and it was a sobering initiation into the difficulties of exploring the West Coast. It certainly gave me a huge amount of respect for the pioneering explorer's; that's for sure. I wasn't unhappy at all when I was made redundant, which put an end to my time in the Clark Valley. In places the bauera and ti-tree scrub was so thick that the survey team essentially tunneled through it with chainsaws.

Although in the subsequent three decades I have climbed dozens of mountains in Tasmania, including Farrell, Murchison, Julia Peak, the Tyndalls, Lyell, Huxley and Jukes, I've yet to summit Mt Sorell or Mt Darwin. Too many residual unpleasant memories of that "summer" perhaps???? In contrast it is astonishing just how much drier the West Coast summers have become since the 1990's, especially in the last dozen or so years. In the last 6 years or so I have hardly had to wear my rain gear at all.

As an aside, although I haven't worked as a geologist for a decade now, I have always firmly believed that there are places where exploration and mining is acceptable, and also that there are places where exploration and mining is definitely not acceptable. The Tarkine falls firmly into the unacceptable category, as do the areas east of the Anthony Road and south of Macquarie Harbour. It is appalling that successive Tasmanian and Federal Governments have not properly designated large areas of the Tarkine as National Park. The current tin exploration by Venture Minerals ought to be stopped permanently before any more damage is done. I would find it completely morally wrong to work in any of those areas.
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Re: "Survey lines" between Mt Sorell and Mt Darwin??

Postby north-north-west » Fri 17 Mar, 2023 7:09 am

Thanks for all that, farefam. A fascinating little piece of recent history.
It certainly is a difficult area to walk (or work) in.
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