CravE

So back on the trail then...

Cradle Mountain is an amazing walk, my favourite so far. The thing I liked about it so much was the tricky but very rewarding climb at the end. You start off by going to the other side of Dove Lake - this is the popular tourist walk and is mainly decked out with a nice wooden walkway and lovely views.

From there you leave the easy path and head off up the first of a number of steep rises for about an hour.

Then there were about two relentless hours of rough ground to cover:

And then this ridiculous pile of rocks rears its head:

One hour of scrambling up huge square boulders. That post with the orange tip marks the trail - not that you would know. It's a general guide but then you have to figure your own way to the next marker. I took this shot after we had made it up that bit so it's looking down the mountain, but you basically have to climb these enormous boulders until you reach the summit. Pretty exhausting and mentally difficult as you have to think how you are going to make it up in some places. There were a lot of people who we passed on the way at this point who were giving up either because they were too tired and realised they had another four hours of walking to get back home or because they just couldn't figure out how to get past certain points. The weather was changing at this altitude too - it was jumper and jacket weather down on the lake but up here there were freak patches of summer snow still on the ground in places kept cool by always being in the shadows of these huge rocks and the cloud was coming in and chilling things down considerably. The constant climbing though meant that we were roasting and stripping down to one layer.