As a general rule, climbing tall things is fun. When those tall things happen to be slap bang in the middle of a rainforest…well these are the best things to climb.
Today, Paddy and I headed to a tower we’ve been to many times before to watch the sun rise. It’s about 10 m high. It’s nice. And it’s a dwarfed by a 100 m pylon which we decided would be much more fun to scale.
We’d tried to reach this pylon’s tip once before. Paddy had been wearing Berkenstocks and it had started to get dark so we’d only reached about half way. This time, we set off earlier (and with much less moronic footwear) with our minds set on reaching the top.
Robin, our next-door neighbour and a canopy scientist who works in jungle treetops, heard we were heading on a climbing adventure and immediately decided to come along.
The pylon was surrounded on all sides by luscious rainforest. Running up the middle of the crisscrossing metalwork were a series of caged ladders that connected platforms that got narrower the higher you ascended.
Years of weathering had left the rungs rusted with a few bent and misshapen. In places, the metal meshwork that made up the platforms folded underfoot so we walked around on the struts wherever possible.
Before long we were level with the forest canopy. We could see birdnest ferns dangling from the trunks below us and the tree crowns stretched as far as the eye could see, like a like green ocean which crawled up the mountains on the horizon.
It was overcast but the views were still spectacular.
A few more platforms and it became difficult to get a sense of scale. The further up we went the trees below us didn’t seem to get any smaller.
By the penultimate platform, some ninety metres in the air, we were above even a soaring eagle. Either a Black Eagle or a dark morph of a Changeable Hawk Eagle—hard to tell which since you tell them apart by the patterning on their underwing.
I volunteered to climb to the top platform first to see if it would support all of our weights. There were no struts on the final level. As I went up the last ladder the sun peaked out from behind the clouds and bathed the treetops with golden light. Quite cinematic for a Monday.
The platform seemed sturdy enough save for a fist-sized hole in the meshing and before long the three of us were standing together on top of the world (and also rather pleased with ourselves).
We spent over an hour up there, watching flecks of sunlight dancing over the jungle and taking photos. My heart was pounding the whole time and when I put on Robin’s Fitbit it showed that it was going fast enough that I was in “fat-burning mode”.
So, I had a chocolate bar while soaking up the panoramic jungle views.
Which, as things go, is a fairly nice way to spend an afternoon.
The view from the top…this light is to warn off low-flying jets!
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