Cradle Mountain

Cradle Mountain is the emblem of the Tasmanian highlands: a jagged wall of dark columns standing above Dove Lake, its four summits notched like the rim of a crown. The highest point reaches 1,545 m, with Smithies Peak, Weindorfers Tower and Little Horn following along the ridge. The shape comes from dolerite, a hard igneous rock that was forced as molten sheets between older sedimentary layers in the Jurassic, cooled into tall vertical columns, and was later laid bare by erosion. Ice finished the work: in the Pleistocene, glaciers scooped out the cirques and lake basins around the mountain, Dove Lake among them, at 934 m.

The country is wild and changeable. Open buttongrass moorland alternates with pockets of rainforest, and the colours change with the seasons: in late April and May the deciduous beech, the fagus – Australia's only native cold-climate deciduous tree, found nowhere but Tasmania – turns from rust to brilliant gold on the slopes. Wombats graze openly on the moorland around Ronny Creek, and pademelons, Tasmanian devils, green rosellas, black currawongs and peregrine falcons all live here. Weather comes in fast from the west, so the same view can be crystal clear and lost in cloud within an hour.

The mountain owes its protection to Gustav Weindorfer, a naturalist born in Carinthia in the Austrian Alps, and his wife Kate Cowle, a botanist and climber. Weindorfer climbed the mountain in January 1910, and Kate became the first Australian woman recorded on its summit; together they campaigned for the area to be set aside for everyone; they built a chalet near Cradle Valley, and the land became a scenic reserve in 1922 and a national park in 1947. Today it is the northern end of Cradle Mountain–Lake St Clair National Park and of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. It is also where the Overland Track begins, the classic multi-day walk south to Lake St Clair, whose route a trapper named Bert Nichols blazed in 1931.

Most visitors walk the Dove Lake Circuit, about 6 km around the water under the face of the mountain, past the much-photographed boatshed of King Billy pine that the park's first ranger, Lionel Connell, built in 1940. The ascent of the summit itself is a different matter: a strenuous return walk of around six to seven hours from Dove Lake, ending in a scramble over huge dolerite boulders to the top.

Getting there

The Cradle Mountain Visitor Centre is about 140 km, roughly an hour and three-quarters' drive, west of Launceston, whose airport (LST) has the most flights; Devonport Airport (DPO), about 70 km away, is the nearest airport, and Devonport also has the car ferry from Melbourne. Burnie lies about 70 km to the north. Park shuttle buses run from the visitor centre to Ronny Creek and Dove Lake, where private cars are not allowed during shuttle hours.