Pemberton
"The Gloucester Tree climb is a spiral of metal spikes with a gap under your feet the whole way up. I did it anyway."
A timber town buried in towering karri forest where you can climb a fire-lookout tree nailed with metal spikes to a platform sixty metres up, if your nerve holds.
Pemberton is deep in the state’s southwest, an hour east of Margaret River but a completely different climate and character — cooler, wetter, buried under some of the tallest hardwood forest on Earth. The karri trees here regularly reach eighty metres, and driving into town along a road tunnelled by their canopy, the temperature actually drops a few degrees, the light goes green, and the whole feeling of the place changes from wine country to something closer to a rainforest at altitude.
The Gloucester Tree is the reason most visitors detour here. It’s a sixty-one-metre karri with a spiral of steel spikes driven into the trunk, originally installed in the 1940s so fire spotters could climb up to a platform and watch for bushfire smoke across the forest canopy. It’s still open to climb, no harness, no safety net, just you, the spikes, and a gap beneath your feet the entire way. I made it about three-quarters of the way up before my hands started sweating enough to worry me, kept going anyway, and the view from the platform — an unbroken sea of karri canopy in every direction — was worth every uncomfortable minute of the ascent. My legs shook for a solid ten minutes after coming back down.
Beyond the tree climb, Pemberton’s identity is built around timber history and, increasingly, cool-climate wine. The Pemberton wine region produces excellent pinot noir and chardonnay, benefiting from a climate too cool for the cabernet that dominates Margaret River further north. I did a small tasting at a cellar door surrounded by karri forest, which is not a sentence I expected to write about Western Australia before I got here.
The Warren and Lefroy Brook drives wind through old-growth forest reserves where some trees predate European settlement by centuries, and the Cascades, a set of small rapids on the Lefroy Brook, make a good short walk if your legs are still recovering from the Gloucester Tree.
When to go: September to April for the driest weather and best conditions for the tree climb, which closes in wet or windy conditions. Autumn (March–April) brings mushroom season to the forest floor, a local specialty worth chasing if you like fungi.