Officially the Cape Tribulation–Bloomfield Road, locally just "the Track," it was punched through to link Cape Tribulation with Cooktown as a coastal alternative to the inland Mulligan Highway. The engineering tells you how unforgiving the country is. To limit the scar through the forest, the builders cut few switchbacks, which left brutally steep gradients straight up and over the Donovan and Cowie Ranges. The route crosses creek after creek as it threads the rainforest before ending at the Aboriginal community of Wujal Wujal on the Bloomfield River. For decades it demanded a four-wheel drive and a cool head; even with bridges added at the Bloomfield River and Woobooda Creek in 2014–15 and sealing on the worst climbs, it is still a dry-weather, drive-with-care proposition. Rain turns it to grease.

Douglas Shire Council and the Queensland Government wanted the road built. Conservationists were appalled: a bulldozed corridor would drag development into rainforest of immense ecological value, where the forest meets the reef and lineages of plants run back tens of millions of years. When the machines arrived, protesters set up camp at the worksite and put their bodies in the way. The scenes — activists in the canopy, police hauling people from the mud, arrests stacking up — drew national and then international attention. They did not, in the end, stop the road. The builders came in from the northern end, flanked the blockade, and pushed the cutting through in roughly three weeks. It opened on 7 October 1984, whereupon rain bogged the official vehicles in the very mud the protesters had warned about.

The blockade failed at its literal task and succeeded at something larger. The delays, the publicity, the photographs of people defending a forest with nothing but their own bodies — all of it lit a fuse under a national conversation about what Australia was bulldozing in its far north. The campaign to save the Daintree gathered force, and in 1988 the surrounding rainforest was inscribed as part of the Wet Tropics of Queensland World Heritage Area. The Queensland Government fought the listing to the bitter end, taking the matter to the High Court of Australia to try to block it. It lost. The forest the bulldozers cut through is now globally protected, in no small part because of the people they arrested.

Today the Track is a pilgrimage as much as a drive. It crawls beneath a canopy that predates the flowering of much of the plant world, past fan palms and strangler figs and the occasional flash of a cassowary crossing the road on legs like a dinosaur's. Crossing the Bloomfield River you arrive at Wujal Wujal, a living Kuku Yalanji community whose people belong to this country far more deeply than any road ever could. Every steep, slithering kilometre carries a double meaning: it is the cut that nearly opened the Daintree, and the line in the mud that helped save it. Few roads anywhere ask you to feel both at once.