My friend Lucy and I stood on the duck board, catching our breath trying to comprehend the beauty before us.
We had just scrambled up a slope of lichen-encrusted boulders to an enchanted plateau of rolling green cushion plants and delicate alpine flowers.
We were in the highlands above Mount Field National Park's famous Tarn Shelf; rocky peaks rose above us and from 1,300m elevation we could see seemingly endless mountains unfurling north and west.
Much of the view fell within the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area.
Despite the beauty, something felt off.
It was hot, the sky was blue, and the highlands were dry — a little too dry.
Water is a feature of the Tasmanian highlands.
The peaks, which are often covered in clouds, collect water. Little rivulets run between mounds of cushion plants, still water forms tiny pools, and larger glacier-carved tarns pepper the landscape.
Many of the small pools have dried up, leaving spots of cracked brown clay in their wake and the tarns are unusually low.
Record-breaking dry summers
Over the past two years much of Australia, including eastern Tasmania, has flooded — but western Tasmania has been having a record dry spell.
Last summer was Tasmania's driest in 40 years. The same climate drivers are at play this year, and we could see evidence of that on the plateau.
The dry weather is caused by westerly winds that whip around the bottom of the Earth shifting south — in what is called a positive Southern Annular Mode — combined with the effects of La Niña.
This has resulted in "increased rainfall in the east and decreased rainfall in the west", Matthew Thomas of the Bureau of Meteorology said.
Tasmania's west is predicted to continue to dry out due to climate change, according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change February 2022 report.
Unusually dry weather is leaving the sensitive ecosystems of the Wilderness World Heritage Area sensitive to fire.
"There's a relentless drying trend, making the landscape really quite receptive to lighting strikes," said David Bowman, fire ecologist at the University of Tasmania.
Just a few days before our visit, water-bombing aircraft had extinguished a fire not far away at Lake Pedder.
'Living fossils' under threat
Professor Bowman describes the idea of fire in the mountains as "chilling" and worries about the pencil pine in particular, a "living fossil" only found in Tasmania.
The tree's lineage stretches back in time to before flowering plants evolved and to the ancient super-continent Gondwana.
"You look at them and you wonder what kind of herbivores they evolved to deal with … dinosaurs would have interacted with them," Professor Bowman said.
"Pencil pines go with the Tasmanian mountains … they are beautiful, they are ancient, they are strange."
Walking the Tarn Shelf on the way to the plateau, Lucy and I had passed through an eerie graveyard of silvery pencil pine stags that had burned in a fire in the 1960s. The fire is thought to have been sparked by embers from forestry burn off.
Unlike other iconic Aussie trees such as eucalypts and banksias, these plants are not adapted for fire.
The stand of dead trees from 60 years ago "shows how slow the recovery is", Professor Bowman said.
"We lost more pencil pines in 2019 and 2016 near the Walls of Jerusalem and Lake Rhona."
The landscape of dead trees could become more common as climate change continued to dry Tasmania's west, the professor said.
Even drier in the south-west
Mount Field is on the cusp of Tasmania's dry zone. Standing on the plateau I turned my eyes and thoughts to rainforest-filled valleys of Tasmania's deep south-west.
The mountains and wild rivers of the west are famous for drenching deluges, but over the past 36 months the area has received record-breaking low rainfall.
Last summer I rafted the Franklin River, which flows through dense cool climate rainforest. It was lovely not to contend with pouring rain however days on end of sunshine was disconcerting in a place famous for being wet.
On the Franklin you can see another ancient tree whose lineage stretches back to the time of the dinosaurs, the Huon pine. A gracious old conifer that is thought to be able to reach 3,000 years of age.
The ancient trees grow by the river, sometimes dipping graceful leaves in the water. But they can also be found deeper in the rainforest taking up water from the moist organic soil.
This soil, made from thousands, if not millions, of years of degraded plant matter is drying out and that makes it flammable.
"The nightmare scenario is major fires in valleys in the south-west," Professor Bowman said.
Dryness in and of itself is a danger for the Huon pine, and the unique moisture-loving plants it shares the rainforest with, such as celery top pine, myrtle, and king billy pine.
"The thing that kills plants, when it gets dry is the vascular system [the water transport system] fails, " explains plant physiologist Professor Tim Brodribb of the University of Tasmania.
"Short, sharp periods of very dry atmospheric conditions and drying soil seem to be able to create, really very stressful conditions very quickly," he said.
"It's quite possible we're going to see forest mortality of a large scale happening in a very rapid transition."
What to do?
Both professors Bowman and Brodribb advocate for active management to conserve the plants of the south-west.
"Ironically, human-induced climate change has been the tipping point [for these plants] … but without human help these plants are going to go extinct," Professor Bowman said.
Returning to "cultural burning with Aboriginal involvement" could be combined with "modern, early detection technology and remote area firefighting" he said.
Remote firefighters were successful in saving an ancient stand of trees described as an "irreplaceable global treasure" last year.
Professor Brodrib is optimistic that we can "arrest" the climate change we have created and is focused of shepherding the ancient trees through the next few decades.
"If we don't manage to slow down climate change and we're not proactive about preserving these things, I would be much more pessimistic … I believe that we can we definitely act as guardians for a change," Professor Brodribb said.
Despite the dryness around us as Lucy and I walked back to our car from the highlands we shared that sense of hope, it is hard not to be inspired by the mountains.
