Tasmania; Cradle Mountain National Park

We drove about two hours from Launceston to Cradle Mountain National Park, located in the Central Highlands of Tasmania.  The road got quite twisty with a fair bit of ups and downs, and the topography changed dramatically!

We stayed at Peppers Cradle Mountain Lodge just outside the park entrance, and we can highly recommend this spot.  We even had our own hot tub overlooking the bush!  They have two restaurants on site, so you never have to leave the place for a meal.  They also have several hiking trails that leave their property, so we did two of those on arrival.  First up was the King Billy Track, a loop through the rainforest.  If you see the times on signs and both your legs are functional then you can safely reduce those by 20-30%.

The “King Billy” is a long-lived and slow growing tree that’s a distant relative to the Sequoia tree.  They were numerous here at one point, but most of them were logged by the colonists in the early 1800’s.  They are now protected, and you will walk past one very old King Billy that was overlooked by the loggers on this short hike.  The hike is almost entirely on a boardwalk, with some steps here and there.

The rainforest is stunningly green everywhere you look.

We saw our first of many “Pademelons” on the edge of the trail.  These are related to Wallabies but smaller.

I’m not happy with the photo, but here is the old King Billy tree that is a short distance to the side of the trail.  It’s estimated to be as much as 1000 years old, and looks just like a Sequoia.  Such a shame they cut so many of these down!

Just across the road from our lodge is another short hike to two waterfalls.

Pencil Pine Falls was maybe 4 minutes away.

Along the same creek is Kynvet Falls, which is nowhere near 45 minutes round trip.  Maybe 25?  Worth the short hike, particularly if it’s been raining.  The two waterfalls are remarkably similar though.

On our way to breakfast the next morning we saw these two Pademelons that looked very different from each other.

This one is a lot lighter in color, and was not afraid of us at all.

To enter the park we needed to buy an entrance/shuttle ticket (available from the lodge) then walked a short distance to the Ranger Station to hop on the bus.  There are no cars allowed into the park, so it’s the shuttle or a rather long hike.

The first views of the Cradle Mountain range are stunning!  The water in the foreground is Dove Lake, which has a perfect 3.7 mile hike around it.  A lot of people hike around it clockwise, but we decided to go counter, and I think that’s better.

Along the trail is the Dove Lake Boatshed, which is apparently an Instragrammers destination of interest.  We were lucky enough to miss them today.

The trail brings you closer and closer to Cradle Mountain, which provides for stunning views.  We had excellent weather!

Some of the sections of trail cling directly to the rock face.  Look at Kim checking out the beauty of the place!  It’s almost Instagrammable!

Towards the end of the trail is a viewpoint called Glacier Rock, that provides a wonderful photo spot.  It also made for a perfect place to eat a picnic lunch.  If only we had brought wine!

We jumped back on the shuttle to head back, and I decided we hadn’t hiked enough, so we got off at a spot called Ronny Creek to hike back down to the Ranger Station.  What’s another 4 miles?  We had heard this was a good path to see wildlife, and we immediately saw this Wombat, the first for us!

We saw no other wildlife the rest of the hike, outside of a LOT of scat on the boardwalk trail.  Of course, when we got back to the lodge, there was a Pademelon AND a Wombat right there!  Grrr.

That night it started raining, quite hard, and that turned into snow.  Not a lot of snow, but it made for an interesting change of view on the way to breakfast.

Up next, we drive 2 hours south to Strahan, on the Tasmanian “Wild West Coast”, and take a cruise on Macquarie Harbor and the Gordon River.