Carry on up the Flozza.. Adventures in the Florintine Forest

Little 4 min movie I made in the flozza up some very big trees!:



The Upper Florentine Forests

Every step you take in the upper Florentine forest presents you with another ridiculously beautiful scene, and I constantly am grinning wide-eyed and grabbing for my camera.



When Peter Jackson filmed the Loth lorian forest scenes in The Fellowship of the Ring he found some amazing NZ forests, but then had to mock up the bases of giant trees to crate the forest he pictured..



These are the forests he was looking for - these are the forests of Loth lorien.. as you weave your way through moss covered myrtles & sassafras's you come across the basses of giant trees then looking up their massive trunks they disappear off into the canopy.



Waking up in the spongy moss under dappled light streaming through the canopy & man-ferns is like waking into more beautiful a dream than you could have ever been having - then rubbing your eyes again and again to really believe what you are seeing.



If forestry get their way this would soon be a road an the stunning giants around us will be falling.

- But the people are resisting!

There are several tree sits up and more on the way the forest kids here really know their stuff.. many are trained arborists and industrial climbers. I've been learning different climbing techniques and how to rig things up.



Plans are afoot for an Ewok village in the treetops with rope bridges connection the different homes. Soon cries of 'Bechawawa' will fill the forest along with the cackling kookaburras.

I soon find myself high above one of the tree-sits sat astride a branch hauling up thick polyprop lines to connect up traverses in the trees around, trying out the newly learned 'donkeys bollox' knot which unfurls itself when looped over a branch - then trying to hurl it over a branch of an adjacent tree. After more tree fishing more trees are 'caught' and traverses put up.



There is an amazing aerial photo of the tree-sit I slept in here on Green Senator Bob Brown's website.

With bountifully dumpsters, kind grennies & locals we eat well in the forest, even campfire baked bread & banana cakes from dumpstered goodies!

Both the Florentine and the Weld are due to be logged any day now.. tree-sits need climbers, so anyone who can get down here do - January is all on!

There are different groups involved in protecting the Upper Florentine... check out:

Forest Defence Unit

The Derwent Forest Alliance

The Wilderness Society