Last week Roy took his online friends to one of the places where he likes to holiday, Copeland Tops. Combining two of Roys favourite things, history and nature, Copeland Tops is a place which Roy fell in love with. Last week Roy looked at the history of the area as a gold field, and this week he will investigate what makes the Copeland Tops area such an amazing place to enjoy nature.
If you would like to visit Copeland Tops you will need to follow the Barrington Tops Forest Road until you reach Copeland Road. Most people seem to approach from Glouchester, but you can also come from Scone in the Hunter Valley. If you come from Scone the drive will take you along a long unsealed road through the Barrington Tops World Heritage Area - it is a beautiful drive and Roy will show you some of the other things to see in the area in later posts. From the Copeland Road, follow the signs to the Copeland Tops State Conservation Area, Mountain Maid Mine and Hidden Treasure Mine. There is a defined trail through the area, and you need to stay on it to avoid dangers, natural and manmade (there are deep mineshafts and stinging trees off the beaten track!)
Copeland Tops is an area unlike any Roy has ever visited before. Roy has spent a lot of time enjoying the great outdoors and loves exploring different types of environments, but what made Copeland Tops so different was the type of rainforest it is. Roy has visited rainforests before, but he has never seen a dry one! Dry rainforests are much rarer than other types of rainforest, and usually they only survive in small areas, often in sheltered positions, like on the side of a hill. The soil in dry rainforests is usually much poorer than that found in other types of rainforest, and often the terrain is also very rocky. As the name suggests, dry rainforests also survive with much less rain than other types, and often they exist in areas where there is a definite wet and dry season, with the rain coming all at once and then long, uninterrupted periods of very dry weather.
These conditions make the type of scenery you see in a dry rainforest like Copeland Tops very different to what most people expect. Most people expect rainforests to be lush and green, and although Copeland Tops is beautiful, it is not the dense, dark, green rainforest we usually think of. Most people also expect a rainforest to have a canopy, an understorey and a ground layer, but Copeland Tops has much less in the way of ground layer than Roy was expecting. In fact, many of the ferns we expected to see carpeting the ground were actually either missing completely, or growing half way up the trees! There were also some really huge trees which punched up right through the canopy and towered above the rainforest. There was one particular tree we think we should warn you about though - the giant stinging tree. This tree is exactly what it says, giant with huge leaves covered with little stinging hairs. These are apparently really painful and in fact the Aboriginals used to throw branches of them into pools to paralyse fish and eels. Not something you want to be getting up close and personal with! Stay on the marked trail and you shouldn't have any trouble!
