2000/02 Australia trip - Cradle Mountain |
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Back in Strahan, we bought a couple of Huon pine souvenirs (should outlast us by a few hundred years!) and set off north through the mountains and moors towards Cradle Mountain. There’s one town and a couple of mines but otherwise empty country.
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Road to Cradle Mountain (3.14) |
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We arrived just before dark, enough time to claim a campsite and walk a couple of short trails in the gloom. There were pademelons and wallabies around, and also a wombat that didn’t seem to be bothered by us at all. Wombats are about the shape and size of a pig, and they dig big burrows that are definitely a hazard. I think they must have been the inspiration for the Wombles of Wimbledon Common
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Dove Canyon (6.54) |
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Monday January 31st
Most of the trails began further up the mountain, at the end of a bad dirt road, so we took the camper up there in the early morning and then used it as a base for the rest of the day. There was a replica up there of the original Waldheim house, built by the Austrian who persuaded the Tasmanian government to protect the area as a national park.
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Dove Lake (19.27) |
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We started hiking around Dove Lake below Cradle Mountain, which is a very unusual shape, all craggy spires except for
one smooth hollow, the “cradle”. This is another of those places where it rains 330 days a year, and the mountain is often hidden in clouds, but we were enjoying some perfect weather, with lots of photos.
We were relaxing on one of the beaches when this hiker came running up to us “Please help! My wife
is falling and has broken her leg!” I had visions of this poor lady dangling from some clifftop, but luckily she was just sitting in the middle of the trail. They were Swiss and his English was a bit limited. She’d just stepped on a rock, turned her ankle and heard the bone snap.
We stayed with her while he ran back down the trail to get help. They were on a one-year vacation so she didn’t expect the injury to mess things up too much. They were only in their thirties, but had seen much of the world by just working long enough to save for their next big trip and then taking off for a year or more. He came back with the news that the park rangers were coming to help.
After an hour of waiting, he had lost patience “If this was heart attack would be dead!”, and asked me to help get her down the trail. This was no easy task as the trail was narrow, and we got to eat a lot of shrub on the way down, but we were in sight of the parking lot when the rangers’ boat passed us on its way down the lake. They, of course, were headed to where we’d been. Eventually they came back for us, and they strapped up her leg and we carried her to the boat. I went back to join Sandie, and they all left in the boat. He was still faced with a 50 mile drive to the nearest doctor in Sheffield. Hopefully it all worked out for them.
After all this our plans for the day were shot, but we finished our hike around the lake. The plants here were the weirdest yet, something out of Dr Seuss, called pandannis. These are giant heath plants, rather like a spider plant on the end of a palm-tree stem. The biggest of these are tree-sized, 30-40 feet high.
We didn’t have time for our planned hike to Crater Lake, but we went up to Lake Lilla and Wombat pond, and then up onto the high ridges for a view of the mountains. We cooked dinner in the camper and went back to Waldheim at sunset to meet with the ranger for a walk in the woods.
She was lighting up the treetops and pointing out the animals while the rest of us walked into trees and each other and fell over rocks. We did have some starlight, which the ranger said was very unusual, as she’d never seen stars there before, usually raining and always cloudy. We also saw wallabies and possums and wombats and a sugar glider. This seemed like a unique natural experience, but when we got back to the campground at about midnight there were two possums scavenging in the bathroom.