Cradle Mountain, Tasmania

Distorted View: Cradle Mountain valley view in a safety reflector

In geologic time, nothing much happens in Australia. The continent has remained flat, dry and unchanged since at least the time T. Rex roamed the planet. This means, among other things, that Australia severely lacks mountains. Ask an Australian to point you to a mountain, and he will indicate some quaint slope that reminds you of the hills you once sledded in grandma’s backyard. “Highest peak in the state!,” he’ll say proudly.

The few mountains that do deserve the title “mountain” are more on par with American’s Appalachian range – gentle, ambling – than they are with the Rockies, which boast severe, jutting peaks and alpine summits.

To craggy-mountain deprived Australians, the iconic Cradle Mountain represents the apex of Tasmanian wilderness. Every place has its “must-sees.” Cradle Mountain was such a place.

Frequently, these tourist must-sees are a bit of a disappointment. A relatively nice but modest attraction is hyped by local tourist centers. Then it is exaggerated by guidebooks, merchandizing, and overly-enthusiastic locals. Eventually this modest attraction becomes mythologized, deified, glorified. Its reality inevitably disappoints.

Visitors to Australia will eventually find themselves hearing well-meaning but over-zealous advice from locals like “Oh, yeah, I reckon you just gotta see the giant Koala at Wangabululah,” without realizing that a large fiberglass marsupial isn’t actually that interesting and maybe best viewed in postcard format.

We had seen endless variations of Cradle Mountain in brochures, photo galleries and on artist’s easels since before we arrived in Tasmania. I have become wary of can’t-be-missed places, but we went nonetheless. It is a “must-see” after all.

Unlike other Australian national parks which tend to be bare-bones, Cradle Mountain National Park resembles American-style national parks: copious parking lots, waddling crowds and short walks undertaken by 95% of visitors, who amble from the car to the nearest designated photographic lookout. But the crowds become refreshingly sparse if you are willing to walk more than a couple hours into the park. Since watching waves of tour buses disgorge an endless stream of doddering package tourists isn’t really my favorite pastime, I decided to stroll for three hours to an A-frame cabin called The Scott Kilvert Memorial Hut. I would base my day trips from there. There is something appealing about staying in a rustic hut in the woods, miles from the nearest electrical outlet.

The trail began easily enough, skirting the peacefully-named Dove Lake before ascending our first mountain, Hanson’s Peak. The trail proceeded upwards, sometimes alarmingly so. At one point I found myself clinging to a long section of chain that had been bolted into an impressively skyward piece of granite.

Let me take a moment to say one thing about this piece of trail work. Australians in general, and Tasmanians in particular, are not subject overstating the difficulty or danger of a trail. Go to a national park in America, and you’ll probably find handrails around the parking lot and warning signs cautioning hapless vacationers about the serious dangers of gravel walkways . Australia does not have a handrail somewhere unless you are really at risk of a perilous three hundred foot drop from a cliff. So a chain on a trail like this is significant.

Shrouded in the distance are the twin crests of Cradle Mountain

Paula was not feeling as comfortable with the trail as I was, so I somehow ended up carrying both of our packs up the heftily chained section. My backpack was in its normal position on my back and hers sat slung by one strap under my arm. My right hand grasped my walking stick; the left hoisted me up the chain one awkward lurch at a time. At one particularly large and crucial step up, I found myself actually grunting with exertion, something I can’t remember ever doing before. The scene looked silly, but I reached the summit, where I was greeted with my first expansive view of the landscape.

Paula makes it look easy. Maybe it's cause she isn't wearing her pack!

The Ice Age – actually, several ice ages – factored heavily in the formation of the park’s wilderness. Glaciers stripped the park’s sheer dolerite spires and gouged the countless lakes, tarns, cirques and moraines. The ice ages created a bizarre alpine environment where one might reasonably expect to encounter mountain lions, marmots and bears. Instead, one meets growling Tasmanian devils, tank-like wombats and duck-billed platypus.

Stop off at a tannin-stained glacial tarn.

As a rule, Tasmania’s weather is fickle, and owing to its towering topography, weather in the Cradle Mountain area is downright unpredictable. As we walked to our hut, the wind blowing against the mountain was forced straight up the dolerite columns. The moisture in the air, which reaches the dew point as it rises over the sheer cliffs, churns into a cloudy vapor. Each dolerite column becomes a smokestack with the clouds seeming to pour forth like an industrial version of nature. Now and then a dazzlingly vivid snatch of blue sky appeared behind the broiling cloud-enshrouded mountain. All hype leading us to this mountain, and all the doubt I felt about this park was forgotten. I watched and watched.

We hauled in enough food to last nearly a week. I wasn’t sure how long we might stay at the hut, but on account of the unpredictable weather, it wasn’t unreasonable to plan for a few days of being shut-in. The last thing I wanted was to hike in, sit through two days of rain and then hike out again when supplies became exhausted.

As it happened, the weather the following day was perfect with enough cloud cover to stay cool but enough sun and blue sky to make the mountain photogenic. We prepared for a long day walk to the summit of Cradle Peak. During these walks I came to appreciate the many wonders of glacial alpine. The landscape is both fragile and resilient. Tiny plants and carpets of mossy groundcovers are easily destroyed when trod upon by hikers. Yet cumulatively these small plants anchor all the other life to the mountain. Without the mossy groundcover, the thin topsoil would vanish in a single storm. It’s fair to say that without these low plants, mountains would be rather sad mounds of bare rocks.

An old section of boardwalked trail is reclaimed by the moist groundcovers

On the third day in the A-frame cabin, we waited through several hours of persistent rain. From the hut’s thoughtful porch, we watched as drizzle transformed into deluge. Our hut, which had previously been on dry land, now seemed as though it had been built in the middle of a flat, wide creek. The drowned, over-saturated landscape drained to a nearby lake, and our hut was in the middle of the two.

The weather report said to expect periodic bad weather, so we decided to retreat to our car. We were well equipped to hike in the rain, and we had comfortable shelter and plenty of food. But given the likelihood of several days of impressive precipitation, there was hardly any point in getting cabin fever.

Sometime in the early afternoon, the rain let up and we made a break for the trail. In Colorado, it doesn’t rain very much and snowmelt isn’t, by definition, torrential until it reaches a river. I might have seen dramatic weather before, but the scene at Cradle Mountain captivated me. The timing of our departure from the cabin, it turned out, was lucky rather than informed. We could enjoy our lush, wet landscape without enduring rain falling on our heads.

In the distance, waterfalls spring from where there had been none the day before

As we walked up the valley and away from the cabin, the trail was transformed. Although it was the fourth time we walked along this particular stretch of track, it water altered it into a completely different place. From sheer, dry limestone cliffs sprung countless waterfalls. I don’t mean little gurgling springs came forth from the rocks. I mean raging torrents plunging nearly 400 feet at a stretch.

The calm tarns now overflowed with tannin soaked water. The small rivulets normally responsible for draining the boggy alpine terrain morphed into rapids. The lake where we had previously bathed was overtaken by the rising waters, which flooded its gravelly beach and bordering trees, and lent it a bizarre, eucalyptus-mangrove aesthetic.

High above Dove Lake on the difficult Face Track

We hiked for an hour, until we reached the saddle that joined three twisting ridgelines. The nature surrounding us was uncontrolled and raw. The pretty heather lands above drained rainwaters into the steep cliffs and glacial cirques below. Each gentle raindrop rushed roaring down the mountainsides.