Today we visited another UNESCO site, this one not of man's creation, but nature's. The Blue Mountains, 50 miles west of Sydney. They are not high by world, or even Cascade, standards but proved a formitable barrier to early settlers wanting to expand beyond the coastal plains. The reason for the difficulty and ultimate success crossing lay in Geology, Geography, and Genealogy.
500 million years ago land that became Australia was beneath a vast ocean. Eons and eons of sand eroded from ancient continents, or deposited by volcanic activity and dead crustaceans, were laid down over this submerged baserock thousands of feet in depth. For millions of years when the seas retreated due to ice ages the exposed land land was covered with plant life. During warming periods the seas advanced covering the accumulated organic material with sand. After millennia of continental drift, and rising and falling sea level from expanding and shrinking ice sheets, the earth thrust these layers of sandstone and their sandwiched layers of organic matter, now coal seams, above the surface to form this continent. (That is unless you believe this was placed as a test of our faith, and the earth is only 6000 years old).
You can see these layers of ancient sand deposits from the coastal shores around Sydney to the Blue Mountains - and ultimately to Uluru in the Red Center. But that's a later story.
The reason early settlers had difficulty crossing mountains only 4000' high is that the geology made the geography impenetrable. Sandstone is soft, you can carve it with a pen knife. The wind and water carved this soft stone into steep valleys and shear headwalls. The first attempts to cross the mountains were consistent with most mountain traverses, they followed the river valleys - the most logical being the Parramatta river. See map below.
The explorers were constantly thwarted by these cliffs and repeatedly gave up. Finally, three Brits decided to bypass the river valley and its impenetrable cliffs by ascending across the top of the sandstone. After 40 days they finally succeeded.
Their route is the same our tour drove today in 50 minutes. It is now being widened into a 4 lane highway. The Blue Mountains run south to north along the coastal plain of eastern Australia from Melbourne to Caines. They are blanketed by forests of Eucalyptus trees - also known as Gum trees. There are over 500 species of Gum in Australia - the picky Koala only eats about 20 of them. The leaves of the trees produce the eponymous herbal oil which evaporates in the summer heat creating the familiar blue haze.
Our activity in the park was to an overlook of the forest and sandstone cliffs, ride a former coal railway, the steepest in the world, to the valley floor, take a guided walk through the Gum and tree fern forest, and finally, take a tram back up and a gondola ride across the gorge.
View Overlook of Eucalyptus Forest and Sandstone Escarpments
To avoid the crush of Sydney traffic at the end of the day we were dropped off at the Parramatta river ferry dock (far left side on map below) for a one hour ride back to Circular Quay in Sydney.
Mouth of the Parramatta river to Sydney Harbor, Port Jackson and the Tasman Sea.
This was a beautiful evening cruise. Initially, it reminded us of the Everglades with the Mangos along the shore of the undeveloped river side. Eventually the Parramatta became wider and the shoreline lined with midrise residential while still miles from the city center. We were truely impressed with how large and developed Sydney is along its entire, and extensive, waterfront.
Shoreline of the Parramatta with Sydney in the distance.
Back to the Blue Mountains, what finally allowed the settlers to move across this formidable barrier were the original colonizers of Austrailia and the ancestors of many citizens - British and Irish convict labor.
Next Post: A brief history of Australia.
No comments:
Post a Comment