And the winds here are fierce. Even Captain Cook, who came here in 1770, was uneasy about exploring this fiord because of the strong landward winds. He labelled the place "Doubtful Harbour" on his maps, and the name stuck.
Glaciers carved the rocks here millions of years ago, taking away all of the soil and leaving only the hardest rock behind. Later, rising sea levels filled the leftover crevices, creating the fiords.
Despite the near total lack of soil, there is an astonishing range of flora and fauna here. The trees, grasses and plants somehow cling to the rock on a frightfully thin carpet of moss and lichen. The trees have interlocking roots to help stabilize them.It's shocking to see so much plant life growing on nearly vertical rock walls. In some ways the entire area seems like a bonsai garden. Trees grow extremely slowly in the harsh environment, so it can take hundreds of years to grow even modest sized trees.
Of course when your roots are interlocked with everyone else's, and there's an especially heavy rain, once in a great while you can all go down together. They call this a "tree avalanche" (or as Dan puts it, a "Treevalanche"). One avalanche, witnessed by a couple of fishermen, apparently lasted only seconds before it was all over. One minute there's an ancient forest, the next minute an enormous swath of bare rock is all that's left. It will be a hundred years or more before this rock cliff grows over again.
I'm afraid that our words and our pictures can hardly do justice to what we saw today.
Finally, since it was such a calm day (apparently to a fiord captain a 35 mile an hour wind qualifies as "calm"), our captain took us right out into the Tasman Sea to see the glacial sill and rocky outcroppings forming the fiord's border with the sea.
Let's just say that Laura was very glad she took her Dramamine, while Dan turned a bit green for a few minutes there!
Dan and Laura at the view of Doubtful Sound from Wilmot Pass:
No comments:
Post a Comment