It was the spectacular bushwalking opportunities that kept me in Tasmania for so many years. The city boy who arrived in the state's rather remote and backwards north west all those years ago soon learnt to find his way around in the bush. And what fabulous bush it was.
The best known bushwalking destination then and now was Cradle Mountain. Preserved in one of Australia's first national parks, thanks to the efforts of Austrian Gustav Weindorfer early last century, it has in some ways become Australia's very own Mt Fuji. Its iconic profile is instantly recognisable, and everyone wants to visit it at some stage in their lives.
Our drive up from Ulverstone took us through little Wilmot, home of the very first Coles store, the forerunner of the present supermarket chain. It's a bit of a museum piece store now, but a favourite stop for the likes of us.
We parked at Ronnies Creek, start of the Overland Track, and off we marched, through button grass plain, up across the alpine moorland from Marions Lookout to Kitchen Hut, and then on to the rocky boulder-strewn path up to Cradle summit itself. This is where it got interesting. I'd done the summit once before, maybe 30 years ago. So of course I'd forgotten just how big the boulders were or how long the boulder zone went on for!
Somehow all of our party found their way up, and what a place! What views - almost all the mountains in the state were on view, so good were the seeing conditions. I no longer manage to identify all of them very confidently, though I think I got away with it with most of my out-of-state audience!
(More pictures in the photo gallery of All Nations Bushwalkers' website):
http://anbwalkers.org.au
