The site is so rugged that no potential helicopter landing pad has yet been found. The pilot had to bring his aircraft to a hover a metre above the ledge, with only one skid over solid ground, while his five passengers clambered out to warnings that sudden movement would tip the machine like a canoe. Abseiling gear and equipment for a day of seed collecting were offloaded, then the helicopter was gone. Crust and a Royal Botanic Gardens horticulturalist, Graeme Errington, immediately began draping ropes into the canyon for two abseils that would take us through the rainforest's canopy and into a fairyland of ferns, fungi and a gloomy impenetrable darkness. The scientists who prepared the draft Wollemi Pine Species Recovery Plan estimate that the amount of light reaching the base of the cliffs where the Wollemi pines live is less than 10 per cent of that above the canopy levels.
Some areas receive less than one hour of direct light per day.
It is a dense forest of coachwood, sassafras, lilly pilly, possumwood, tree ferns, red gum and grey gum surrounding a pristine stream full of yabbies. Although fauna surveys are still incomplete, it is known that the site boasts bush rats capable of eating through plastic barrels, and a full suite of possums, gliders and antechinuses. From where we were dropped there is a 15-minute walk upstream to King Billy and the 39 other adult Wollemi pines. The pines are in two separate populations one kilometre apart. The southernmost colony is almost never visited by anybody, deliberately left alone to remain a reference point for research.