Cradle Mountain Summit

At 1545m, Cradle Mountain is renowned internationally as one of Australia's most photographed and visited mountain peaks.

The national park surrounding the rugged peak is the focus of the Overland Track, which leads right past the mountain. This area, in the northern part of the park is higher and more exposed than further south but still contains fine examples of trees such as myrtle, tanglefoot, King Billy and pencil pines. In winter it is mostly covered with snow.
In summer, you get the feeling these grass monsters are trying to creep up on you when you're not looking...

A walk to the summit was the focus of our time in this area, and as the weather was good due to be unusually good for the first day, we set off to conquer the mountain!

The start of the suggested route begins at Ronny Creek, along the beginning of the Overland Track and ascending past Crater Lake

Looking across to Crater Peak, which we'll come to late...

and heading up a steep section to look down on Crater Lake

and across to Crater Peak

before heading up to Marion's Lookout at 1223m
where you can look across to Mount Campbell

down to Dove Lake

back towards Lake Lilla and Dove Lake

and get a good view of Cradle Mountain

From here, the path stretches out across some moorland

with Barns Bluff in the distance, the next stop for those doing the Overland Trail


before reaching the Kitchen Hut, which can be seen as a tiny spot in the above photo and shown below

You may notice that there are two doors to the hut, and that there is a shovel at the top door.

this shows how much snow the mountain can get in winter. Question is, how do you reach the shovel...

ah yes... that's better...

If you look closely from here you get a good idea of the jagged edges of the summit ridge, see how carefully this rock is balanced...

From the kitchen hut, the path up to the summit is quite visible

Thankfully, we discovered the the path doesn't actually go straight up, but bend to the right, which you may just be able to work out.

Still, that's not to say it was any easier that we thought!
The final summit approach is very jagged dolerite rock!

We stopped to investigate this platform rock


before climbing up to the summit

As with every good mountain, we found one of these

The panorama from the top on a clear day ranks as one of the best in Tasmania, with much of the north-west of the state in view.
View to the West

View to the South

View to the North

Unfortunately, this is where I pointed out to Eric that we weren't up the highest mountain in Tasmania, in fact, it's only the 5th highest Mountain, and that Barns Bluff is the second highest, by only 14m more that where we were standing...

Mount Ossa is the highest mountain in Tasmania, at 1,617m - another 72m higher than where we stood.

Still, we were pleased to get to the top

and took some time to take some photos

Before heading back down. Unfortunately, climbing up, meant climbing down, and it was just as rocky!!

As we walked further away, it was nice to look back and see what we had accomplished. Here you can see Cradle Mountain, with Barns Bluff

We had time to stop and admire the alpine daisies

before continuing on to Crater Peak - which could be seen earlier from the other side of Crater Lake.
It was great to look across and see most of the path we had walked up earlier in the day, up to the summit of Cradle Mountain.