Nele & Andrew Around Oz: Waterfall Valley Hut, Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park, TAS

Day 302 – 15^th December 2011

Waterfall Valley Hut, Cradle Mountain-Lake St Clair National Park, TAS

Day 1 of 8 – Overland Track

Ronny Creek to Waterfall Valley (10km, 380m ascent, 250m descent)

Side Trip: Cradle Mountain (2km return, 340m ascent/descent)

This morning we left on our Overland Track Hike. We parked the van at the visitor information centre and took the shuttle bus to Ronny Creek carpark. Before leaving on the walk we signed the walker book to register our trip and intended finishing date. On the first stretch of boardwalk we were lucky to see a wombat – he must have been wishing us well. We walked past Crater Falls and Crater Lake, climbing our way up with heavy loaded backpacks to Marion’s Lookout from where you get great views over Dove Lake, Cradle Mountain and the plains back to Ronny Creek carpark. At the lookout Andrew realized he had taken a wrong plastic bag out his pack this morning – a last minute decision to leave an extra thermal top behind made him pull out the bag containing his thermal pants, gloves and beanie. As these may be quite essential if the weather would get bad we were stuck with a dilemma of going back or not. We decided Andrew would walk back and Nele would stay with the packs and enjoy the scenery. Andrew ran down in 30min, caught the bus back to the van, grabbed his other bag, waited 10min for the bus before getting back to Ronny Creek and finally walked/ran back up in 45min, making it a 2h return trip to Marion’s Lookout. Not bad! We had a quick lunch before continuing on to Kitchen Hut. We left our packs in the bushes and climbed up Cradle Mountain. A hard climb over big boulders towards the end which Nele didn’t enjoy all that much, but the views from the top were spectacular. We walked back down to discover the crows had found our packs and managed to undo our special trick of closing the zips, but luckily they didn’t get too much stuff out. We started walking again and were happy to reach the hut by 7.30pm. Luckily there was still some room for us to sleep in the hut, as we didn’t feel like putting the tent up. It’s been a day of solid walking with an extra trip for Andrew! We heated up our precooked risotto meal and after tea it was almost bedtime.