A Tail of Lilli and a Trip across a range.

First up (and because I promised) a quick story about Lilli the Labrador.

As I said the other day Lilli is now becoming really quite well trained.She is a funny thing really eager to please but quite anxious about things she doesn’t know. I think I told the story about her being frightened by the kitten over the back fence (which reminds me of other Lilli tails).  

Any way back to the story.

She is still young and bouncy (which is very nice) but having 29 kg (64lb) of Lab bouncing around can be quite disconcerting not to say dangerous. So one of the things we do with her is get her to sit before we feed her or put her lead or do any of a lot of things.

“Sit” was the first command she learnt so she is really good at obeying it. The rules are that if one of us says “sit” or gives a hand signal Lilli has to sit and stay until we say “free”.

E our eldest discovered how good Lilli is the other week. E had been planning to take Lilli for a walk so she gave the "sit" command so she could put Lilli on her lead. As E got the lead the phone rang so naturally she answered the call. It was one of her friends from University, so without thinking E went into her bedroom to talk.

E chatted for about half an hour. Then she checked what was on TV. About an hour after she answered the phone she heard Lilli whine from the back room. Thinking that wasn’t like Lilli E went to check what was wrong. Only to find Lilli still loyally sitting in exactly the same spot she had been left!
E decided the whine was an “excuse me, I think you have forgotten something”.

Lilli at the park

Like a small miracle it actually dried up enough this morning so I could mow the lawn.
So Deb and I set off late again today. We headed up to the Yarra Valley and paused in Warburton at a favourite café for a coffee.
 
I sat and played with my camera (nothing new there) and took this piccie through the front window.

It is a cottage on the main street of Warby (as locals call it)

As we left I paused to take a piccie of the main street to catch a bit of the fast disappearing blue sky.

As I have posted recently we have been having a wet miserable and cold winter.

From Warby we followed a road we haven’t used before.
It climbs the flank of Mount Donna Buang before swinging up through the Acheron Gap into the central Highlands of Victoria.

I say road, but muddy track is more like it.

We paused as we climbed into the Mountain Ash forest that is a feature of so much of the Yarra Ranges.


Just over the Acheron Gap is a pocket of rainforest.

I had to pause to catch this mini waterfall that tumbles from a spring just above the road.


The water up there is crystal clear and probably as clean as you will find anywhere.

As you can see this spring literally tumbles into the table drain alongside the track.


As we came down the other side I paused one last time to get some shots of the Acheron River which is made up of the water collected from hundreds of springs like the one I snapped.
The Acheron is also clear and clean and is a popular trout stream in season.

By the way the blue vehicle is our “other car” a Renault SUV. I have resisted owning a gas guzzler for ever but eventually early in the year I admitted that we were abusing our poor FIAT too much on mountain and outback roads. So we got this second hand Renault all-wheel drive, It goes anywhere we want to take it and it is diesel so it is still pretty light on fuel (about 38 mpg) which is the same as our little FIAT.

Ghosts

You’ll have to forgive me but the tone of this post is a bit somber.
On Saturday Deb and I went for one of our weekend drives.

As so often happens we drove out into the mountains to the east of Melbourne.
We decided to head up to Lake Mountain to see how the snow is going in the tail end of the season.

The road to Lake Mountain passes through Marysville which was devastated in the Black Saturday bushfires back in February last year. Across the state of Victoria 173 people perished in the fires.

We paused in a valley behind Marysville where I grabbed these piccies.

What was a lush valley of Mountain Ash trees is a stark graveyard of greying ghosts. The reason these trees are grey is after the fires the burnt bark has fallen from those that have died.The trees covered in a green fuzz in this piccie are the ones that pulled through the fire. Normally after a bushfire you would see the bush bouncing back and all the trees except a few would have come through. These fires were just too hot.

Back on the main road we drove further up the valley.
In places low clouds softened the ridge-lines covered in dead trees. The Aussie bush is not deciduous, these trees are bare not because of winter but because they have perished.
Finally on the high ridges ahead we saw what we had come for: Snow