We had decided on the Saturday night that we would attempt to climb Cradle Mountain on the Sunday... This was going to be quite a long walk and potentially quite difficult but we decided to give it a go anyway.... Disappointingly on the Sunday the weather was still a bit cold and wet but we thought that this might go in our favour and keep us cool....
We got the shuttle bus from the Cradle Mountain visitor's centre to Lake Dove and from there walked down to see the Boathouse and the Mountain - or not as the case might be... We could hardly see the top of Cradle Mountain but undaunted continued on our way..... The map of the walk is shown on below. We were due to follow the Dove Lake track round passed the boat shed, go through the Ballroom Forest, pass Lake Wilks, join the Face Track, join with the Overland Track at the Kitchen Hut where we could take the path to the Cradle Mountain Summit, and come back down via the Overland Track passed Marion's Lookout, branch off down the track passed the Wombat Pool and Lake Lilla and back to the Dove Lake Car Park.
Part of the walk was noted as being steep and slippery in the guide book - they were not lying either!!!!! Unfortunately as the weather was not too good we did not get the amazing views and pictures we hoped for but here is some of what we saw on the way up to the turn off for the Cradle Mountain summit path.
Disappointingly, by the time we got to the turn off to the summit, the cloud and rain had came in even lower and we decided not to try to reach the summit... I had had a bad fall already slipping on wet rock and we figured we would not be able to see anything anyway!!!
So we continued our walk off the hill passing the Kitchen Hut on the Overland Track.
As we walked off the hill, the weather started to clear up a bit and we managed to get some better views of Cradle Mountain and the surrounding countryside.
In the evening we did a night spotlit drive to see more of the native Australian animals. We saw heaps of wombats, wallabies, possums etc..... We were very fortunate to see the flash of a Tassie Devil as it ran off the road as well....
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