It’s difficult to know what to say about this wonderful adventure. The link to pictures is at the bottom of this post, and they tell much of the story.
I guess the best way to try to tell the rest of the story is to start with the basics and at the beginning. The hike was a six day guided walk with a company called Cradle Huts. “Guided” meant we had two guides and that we stayed at private huts. We walked from Cradle Mountain to the top of Lake St. Clair. With side trips, it was about 75 kilometers.
We met at the appointed pick up spot (a hotel in Launceston) at 6:20 in the morning on the first day of the hike. There are up to 10 people on each hike, and if the hike is full, single travelers are assigned roommates, who could be male or female. Being a single traveler, I was curious to see who my hiking companions would be. The first group I met was seven women friends from Australia. They were hiking on the occasion of one of their 50th birthdays, and had been told that one of the people on their trip was "an international girl." (Me.) (Long time since I've thought of myself as a girl...) The other two members of our party showed up soon, and were a delightful couple from Australia (Neville and Jenny) celebrating Jenny’s 50th birthday. So we ended up with 9 women and one man, all by chance aged 48 to 52. The seven friends were exuberant and extroverted, generous and welcoming, and the group got on well together. Neville looked a bit stunned when he walked into the meeting place and saw that he would be hiking with nine women, but he coped very well. Fortunately one of the group of seven had had the thoughtfulness to request that Cradle Huts include at least one male guide, which they did, so at least he wasn’t completely on his own.
After we had all assembled, we boarded the bus and headed out to the Cradle Huts headquarters on a property called Pleasant Banks. In addition to serving as the jumping off point for the hikes, Pleasant Banks is an equestrian/dressage facility, so there were a number of curious horses looking at us with interest as we drove up.
Our first task was to pack our gear. Cradle Huts provided packs and lightweight Gortex rain jackets. We carried all of our clothing and personal gear, but no sleeping bags, tents, cooking equipment or food. Due to the unpredictable weather extremes, we were required to bring quite a bit of bad weather gear, so our packs were still in the 20 to 25 pound range.
After having our gear inspected, we headed off in the bus again. A couple of hours later, we were at Waldheim, the starting point of the hike.
Day One was the steepest hike, as we had to climb up onto the plateau. The Overland Track mountains are not particularly high. The tallest is Mt. Ossa, at about 1700 meters (5,200 feet), and once you're on the plateau, the trail crosses high plains and open moorland dotted with lakes, winds around craggy mountains, and dips into magical rain forests with tall trees, ferns, mosses, streams and waterfalls. There had been snow the previous week, and there were still patches of white here and there in the highlands. Many of the trees in the area are ancient varieties -- conifers and ferns unchanged from their ancestors that evolved during the days of the dinosaurs. The eucalypt trees (gum trees) were unfamiliar to me, and always seemed very other-worldly with their pastel colored, multi-hued barks and their foliage growing in tufts or bunches at the tops of the tree. They may have filmed Lord of the Rings in New Zealand, but the areas we walked through certainly looked quite eldritch.
At the first lake we stopped at, we learned about the Six Day Challenge, which is to go swimming once each day on the hike. I was a wimp and declined to participate (didn't even consider it!), but our female guide ended up successfully completing the challenge. Another of our party swam 5 out of 6 days, but skipped the day that was quite windy and cold.
At our first lunch, we got water out of the nearby stream and the guides made tea, coffee or milo (a chocolate drink). As someone who has a tendency to make my lunch stops on hikes a brief stop for an energy bar and a little water, I found it quite civilized to eat a proper lunch, wait for the water to boil, and brew and sip our tea. At first it was a little disconcerting to be drinking out of streams (that hadn’t turned out well the time I tried it in the Smokey Mountains with D'Na, Pam, and Rob), but this area is so pristine that you can pretty much drink out of any stream or lake. Of course, the downside to a lovely break at lunch is that you have to get completely warmed up again when you start hiking, but that's doable.
At the end of the first day we got our first look at the huts that would be our homes for the next five nights. They were marvels of cozy efficiency. Six small bedrooms (five for the guests, one for the guides), a big kitchen/dining room/living area, hot showers, and a drying room. Solar energy charged the batteries that powered the lights. Rainwater was collected for water. The gas stoves, range, oven, and water heaters were powered by liquid propane gas. The huts are stocked via helicopter with staples twice a season. Each hut has a different dinner menu that is cooked every night: lentils and sausages at the first hut, risotto with mushrooms and peas at another, pasta and red sauce at another, etc. Food scraps not taken along for lunch are composted; recycling and waste are removed by helicopter.
The huts had no refrigeration, so the guides carried some fresh food items to supplement the hut staples for the first few nights. Each day, one guide would go ahead in the early afternoon to get the next hut ready. By the time we arrived, there were snacks (sometimes muffins, sometimes scones, etc.) and beverages waiting to tide us over until dinner.
Dinner was soup, an entrée, and a desert, with Tasmanian wine. Each group got a quota of 3 bottles of red and 2 bottles of white each night. The guides baked bread every night, so we had fresh toast for breakfast and fresh bread to make sandwiches out of for lunch each day.
Needless to say, most people who do the Overland Track don’t do it in such a pampered fashion … they carry their food, cooking gear, sleeping bag and tent, they do without showers, they use smelly pit toilets at the public huts, and they certainly don’t have wine for dinner every night. As we hiked, I frequently thought about what I would think of people doing the track the way we were doing it if I were doing it on my own, and my thoughts weren’t particularly charitable. But leaving aside the "right" or "wrong" way of doing the trip, we definitely traded some independence and self sufficiency for security and creature comforts, and the peace and solitude of a small group or solo hiker for the conversation and opportunity to meet new friends in a large group.
Day Three was land leech day, as most of us managed to collect a leech during our hike. I had not been aware until I went to Tasmania that there were such things as land leaches, but I got a first hand acquaintance with the little critters. They drop right off when you pour a little salt on them, though. We took several side trips that, in addition to passing through low brush where the leeches lived, were “unimproved.” Most of the muddy portions of the main track were duckboarded (i.e., improved with wooden tracks.) This is a huge benefit for the walkers, but was probably done just as much for environmental reasons. When the top layer of vegetation is broken at that altitude, it doesn’t recover, and the ground underneath quickly starts eroding. When it’s wet, the eroded ground turns to mud. Left to their own devices, hikers will keep walking farther and farther around the muddy spots, creating more eroded ground and larger and larger mud holes. As a result, low impact hiking guidelines say that when you come to a mud hole, you go right through the center. The unimproved trails were full of mud holes. And being environmentally sensitive hikers, we resolutely (if somewhat gingerly) marched through the mud. Most of the time it was only 4-5 inches deep, but sometimes you’d hit a hole and go down a foot or more, making us appreciate our gaiters. We passed some independent hikers who obviously hadn’t been trained in the value of low impact hiking. As they walked by on the edge of the mud hole and stayed clean and dry, they must have thought we were absolute idiots for squelching through the mud.
The weather was good every day but Day Four, which was the day we would have climbed Mt. Ossa. We typically left our packs on the side of the trail when we took side trips, and without packs, Mt. Ossa is usually a 5 hour round trip hike, including lunch at the top. But it was cold and rainy and extremely windy that day, and we couldn’t even see the top of the mountain through the clouds, so we ended up not doing the Mt. Ossa side trip. Nobody was terribly disappointed at the time. Day Four/Day Five was also the day the cold I had been fighting finally hit.
On the fifth night (Thanksgiving Day in the states) we had a combined 50th birthday party for the two birthday girls, Thanksgiving dinner for the Yank, and farewell dinner for the group.
All of the 50-ish people whose day jobs involved working in offices held up very well on the trip. Several people had concerns (foot problems, fear of heights, knee problems, back issues), but there was never a serious whine or complaint (or whinge as we say in Australia), and although it was sometimes difficult to get the group into motion, we traveled well (if noisily) once we were underway.
On the sixth day, we hiked down off the plateau to the top of Lake St. Clair and took a ferry about 15 kilometers to the other end, cutting a day or so off what could be an even longer hike. There we met the bus and drove back to Pleasant Banks, our starting point. As we unloaded the packs we had carried for the past 6 days and transferred our gear into our travel luggage, cell phones come out and were turned on and chirped with voice mail messages. A few people wandered off to converse with the outer world. Hiking gear was replaced by jeans and other travel-wear, and our group transformed back to city dwellers.
In a philosophical moment, I asked someone if we had been changed by our journey. Her reply was “you don’t always have to be changed by a journey; it’s enough to simply appreciate it.”
Then it was time for a glass of champagne and one last trip in the bus. The seven friends were headed to the airport and back to Sydney for the 50th birthday party, while Jenny and Neville and I headed to hotels in Launceston.
It’s hard to sum up the trip in words. The Overland Track is a unique and beautiful area. The guides and private huts were superb. At first I felt a bit guilty to have had such a luxurious trip (i.e. guided, staying in huts), but after thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that huts are maintained with a high respect for the environment, and that these trips provide the opportunity for a lot of people to do the Overland Track (and support the park by paying fees) who wouldn’t otherwise do so. I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to have done the hike. If I have a wish for the next hike I take (and for life in general), it is to continue growing more present to each moment. There were too many times when I caught myself doing heads-down hiking, or thinking or talking about something totally trivial, and realized I was missing out on the amazing world in front of me. And at the end of the trip I found myself thinking "but wait ... I didn't pay enough attention to every moment." What do they say ... life is a matter of moments, not milestones? Ah, well. An opportunity for my ongoing journey...
Pictures are here.
I guess the best way to try to tell the rest of the story is to start with the basics and at the beginning. The hike was a six day guided walk with a company called Cradle Huts. “Guided” meant we had two guides and that we stayed at private huts. We walked from Cradle Mountain to the top of Lake St. Clair. With side trips, it was about 75 kilometers.
We met at the appointed pick up spot (a hotel in Launceston) at 6:20 in the morning on the first day of the hike. There are up to 10 people on each hike, and if the hike is full, single travelers are assigned roommates, who could be male or female. Being a single traveler, I was curious to see who my hiking companions would be. The first group I met was seven women friends from Australia. They were hiking on the occasion of one of their 50th birthdays, and had been told that one of the people on their trip was "an international girl." (Me.) (Long time since I've thought of myself as a girl...) The other two members of our party showed up soon, and were a delightful couple from Australia (Neville and Jenny) celebrating Jenny’s 50th birthday. So we ended up with 9 women and one man, all by chance aged 48 to 52. The seven friends were exuberant and extroverted, generous and welcoming, and the group got on well together. Neville looked a bit stunned when he walked into the meeting place and saw that he would be hiking with nine women, but he coped very well. Fortunately one of the group of seven had had the thoughtfulness to request that Cradle Huts include at least one male guide, which they did, so at least he wasn’t completely on his own.
After we had all assembled, we boarded the bus and headed out to the Cradle Huts headquarters on a property called Pleasant Banks. In addition to serving as the jumping off point for the hikes, Pleasant Banks is an equestrian/dressage facility, so there were a number of curious horses looking at us with interest as we drove up.
Our first task was to pack our gear. Cradle Huts provided packs and lightweight Gortex rain jackets. We carried all of our clothing and personal gear, but no sleeping bags, tents, cooking equipment or food. Due to the unpredictable weather extremes, we were required to bring quite a bit of bad weather gear, so our packs were still in the 20 to 25 pound range.
After having our gear inspected, we headed off in the bus again. A couple of hours later, we were at Waldheim, the starting point of the hike.
Day One was the steepest hike, as we had to climb up onto the plateau. The Overland Track mountains are not particularly high. The tallest is Mt. Ossa, at about 1700 meters (5,200 feet), and once you're on the plateau, the trail crosses high plains and open moorland dotted with lakes, winds around craggy mountains, and dips into magical rain forests with tall trees, ferns, mosses, streams and waterfalls. There had been snow the previous week, and there were still patches of white here and there in the highlands. Many of the trees in the area are ancient varieties -- conifers and ferns unchanged from their ancestors that evolved during the days of the dinosaurs. The eucalypt trees (gum trees) were unfamiliar to me, and always seemed very other-worldly with their pastel colored, multi-hued barks and their foliage growing in tufts or bunches at the tops of the tree. They may have filmed Lord of the Rings in New Zealand, but the areas we walked through certainly looked quite eldritch.
At the first lake we stopped at, we learned about the Six Day Challenge, which is to go swimming once each day on the hike. I was a wimp and declined to participate (didn't even consider it!), but our female guide ended up successfully completing the challenge. Another of our party swam 5 out of 6 days, but skipped the day that was quite windy and cold.
At our first lunch, we got water out of the nearby stream and the guides made tea, coffee or milo (a chocolate drink). As someone who has a tendency to make my lunch stops on hikes a brief stop for an energy bar and a little water, I found it quite civilized to eat a proper lunch, wait for the water to boil, and brew and sip our tea. At first it was a little disconcerting to be drinking out of streams (that hadn’t turned out well the time I tried it in the Smokey Mountains with D'Na, Pam, and Rob), but this area is so pristine that you can pretty much drink out of any stream or lake. Of course, the downside to a lovely break at lunch is that you have to get completely warmed up again when you start hiking, but that's doable.
At the end of the first day we got our first look at the huts that would be our homes for the next five nights. They were marvels of cozy efficiency. Six small bedrooms (five for the guests, one for the guides), a big kitchen/dining room/living area, hot showers, and a drying room. Solar energy charged the batteries that powered the lights. Rainwater was collected for water. The gas stoves, range, oven, and water heaters were powered by liquid propane gas. The huts are stocked via helicopter with staples twice a season. Each hut has a different dinner menu that is cooked every night: lentils and sausages at the first hut, risotto with mushrooms and peas at another, pasta and red sauce at another, etc. Food scraps not taken along for lunch are composted; recycling and waste are removed by helicopter.
The huts had no refrigeration, so the guides carried some fresh food items to supplement the hut staples for the first few nights. Each day, one guide would go ahead in the early afternoon to get the next hut ready. By the time we arrived, there were snacks (sometimes muffins, sometimes scones, etc.) and beverages waiting to tide us over until dinner.
Dinner was soup, an entrée, and a desert, with Tasmanian wine. Each group got a quota of 3 bottles of red and 2 bottles of white each night. The guides baked bread every night, so we had fresh toast for breakfast and fresh bread to make sandwiches out of for lunch each day.
Needless to say, most people who do the Overland Track don’t do it in such a pampered fashion … they carry their food, cooking gear, sleeping bag and tent, they do without showers, they use smelly pit toilets at the public huts, and they certainly don’t have wine for dinner every night. As we hiked, I frequently thought about what I would think of people doing the track the way we were doing it if I were doing it on my own, and my thoughts weren’t particularly charitable. But leaving aside the "right" or "wrong" way of doing the trip, we definitely traded some independence and self sufficiency for security and creature comforts, and the peace and solitude of a small group or solo hiker for the conversation and opportunity to meet new friends in a large group.
Day Three was land leech day, as most of us managed to collect a leech during our hike. I had not been aware until I went to Tasmania that there were such things as land leaches, but I got a first hand acquaintance with the little critters. They drop right off when you pour a little salt on them, though. We took several side trips that, in addition to passing through low brush where the leeches lived, were “unimproved.” Most of the muddy portions of the main track were duckboarded (i.e., improved with wooden tracks.) This is a huge benefit for the walkers, but was probably done just as much for environmental reasons. When the top layer of vegetation is broken at that altitude, it doesn’t recover, and the ground underneath quickly starts eroding. When it’s wet, the eroded ground turns to mud. Left to their own devices, hikers will keep walking farther and farther around the muddy spots, creating more eroded ground and larger and larger mud holes. As a result, low impact hiking guidelines say that when you come to a mud hole, you go right through the center. The unimproved trails were full of mud holes. And being environmentally sensitive hikers, we resolutely (if somewhat gingerly) marched through the mud. Most of the time it was only 4-5 inches deep, but sometimes you’d hit a hole and go down a foot or more, making us appreciate our gaiters. We passed some independent hikers who obviously hadn’t been trained in the value of low impact hiking. As they walked by on the edge of the mud hole and stayed clean and dry, they must have thought we were absolute idiots for squelching through the mud.
The weather was good every day but Day Four, which was the day we would have climbed Mt. Ossa. We typically left our packs on the side of the trail when we took side trips, and without packs, Mt. Ossa is usually a 5 hour round trip hike, including lunch at the top. But it was cold and rainy and extremely windy that day, and we couldn’t even see the top of the mountain through the clouds, so we ended up not doing the Mt. Ossa side trip. Nobody was terribly disappointed at the time. Day Four/Day Five was also the day the cold I had been fighting finally hit.
On the fifth night (Thanksgiving Day in the states) we had a combined 50th birthday party for the two birthday girls, Thanksgiving dinner for the Yank, and farewell dinner for the group.
All of the 50-ish people whose day jobs involved working in offices held up very well on the trip. Several people had concerns (foot problems, fear of heights, knee problems, back issues), but there was never a serious whine or complaint (or whinge as we say in Australia), and although it was sometimes difficult to get the group into motion, we traveled well (if noisily) once we were underway.
On the sixth day, we hiked down off the plateau to the top of Lake St. Clair and took a ferry about 15 kilometers to the other end, cutting a day or so off what could be an even longer hike. There we met the bus and drove back to Pleasant Banks, our starting point. As we unloaded the packs we had carried for the past 6 days and transferred our gear into our travel luggage, cell phones come out and were turned on and chirped with voice mail messages. A few people wandered off to converse with the outer world. Hiking gear was replaced by jeans and other travel-wear, and our group transformed back to city dwellers.
In a philosophical moment, I asked someone if we had been changed by our journey. Her reply was “you don’t always have to be changed by a journey; it’s enough to simply appreciate it.”
Then it was time for a glass of champagne and one last trip in the bus. The seven friends were headed to the airport and back to Sydney for the 50th birthday party, while Jenny and Neville and I headed to hotels in Launceston.
It’s hard to sum up the trip in words. The Overland Track is a unique and beautiful area. The guides and private huts were superb. At first I felt a bit guilty to have had such a luxurious trip (i.e. guided, staying in huts), but after thinking about it, I came to the conclusion that huts are maintained with a high respect for the environment, and that these trips provide the opportunity for a lot of people to do the Overland Track (and support the park by paying fees) who wouldn’t otherwise do so. I feel privileged to have had the opportunity to have done the hike. If I have a wish for the next hike I take (and for life in general), it is to continue growing more present to each moment. There were too many times when I caught myself doing heads-down hiking, or thinking or talking about something totally trivial, and realized I was missing out on the amazing world in front of me. And at the end of the trip I found myself thinking "but wait ... I didn't pay enough attention to every moment." What do they say ... life is a matter of moments, not milestones? Ah, well. An opportunity for my ongoing journey...
Pictures are here.
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