Cradle Mountain
Tasmania
January 30, 2026
We checked out of our Sydney hotel and retrieved our rental car from the underground parking garage. We then drove about 20 minutes to the Sydney domestic airport, choosing to take city streets rather than the long and boring tunnel we took coming in to the city on Wednesday.
After turning in the rental car, we took a flight to Hobart, Tasmania. The flight was a bit less than two hours in duration. So far, so good! Then things ground to a halt. The suitcases took a long time to show up; the rental car desk was over-crowed moving very slowly; and the first car we were assigned did not work with Apple CarPlay, an essential mapping service! An attendant tried for almost a half hour to get it to work with our phone and finally assigned us another car for which CarPlay worked. All rental cars should be Toyota Rav4’s because then Apple CarPlay works! We had the same experience a year earlier in Auckland, again saved by a Rav4. This delay meant we didn’t get on the road for close to two hours from the time we got off the plane. On the subject of maps, we might mention that it turned out to have been essential to download maps for offline use, since there were many stretches of our trip with no cell service.
At this point, we decided to pass on lunch and started the four hour drive to Cradle Mountain National Park. The first half of the drive was through primarily agricultural lands with a very sparse human population. The landscape was drier than we expected.
We then climbed up through jagged mountains with forests of large native trees and ferns, having a nice view of Mt. Roland at 1,234 meters, eventually reaching a plateau at 1,000 meters where our lodge is located at the entrance to Cradle Mountain National Park. We had one brief peak at the famous Cradle Mountain and hope it will be visible tomorrow. We would learn later that Cradle Mountain, at 1,545 meters (5,070 feet) is not the highest mountain in Tasmania; there are four that are taller.
The 645 mile route for our
flight from SYD to HBA.
Mount Roland on the way to Cradle Mountain
We saw our first wildlife around the lodge, several wallabies and one shy pademelon (a somewhat smaller marsupial). Here is a wallaby photo.
January 31, 2026
After breakfast, we drove a couple of kilometers to the National Park Headquarters to purchase tickets for the park’s mandatory visitor shuttle bus, which takes visitors to several spots in the park. It was not sunny. We rode about 20 minutes to the end of the park road, passing more wallabies on the way.
We exited the bus at the end of the line, at Dove Lake. Unfortunately, it was still cloudy and some of the mountaintops were obscured. But we nonetheless decided to take one of the most well–known walks in Tasmania, the Dove Lake Circuit.
Early in the walk, pretty dense clouds.
The instructions were to circle the lake in a clockwise direction. A large percentage of the trail is on wooden boardwalks, with many up and down sections, most of which involve stairs. We walked through some open chaparral and some deeply forested areas. In a few places, the trail went down to a beach, and in others, it climbed high above the lake.
The path is shown in the photo on the right. Below, a view of Cradle Mountain.
Some more views around the lake, including detail on the vegetation. To the right are pandanas trees, which we thought were only in the warm parts of Australia.
One last photo, taken back at the visitor center.
The advertised distance of the trail was either 6 or 6.5 kilometers, both distances were given in park materials. The suggested time to walk the trail ranged from two to three hours. Our trail mapping application said we walked four miles (that would be 6.44 km) and had an elevation gain of 572 feet. The trip took us 2 hours and 45-50 minutes, since we made many picture stops and a had a five or ten minute rest on a bench at the half way point.
We took the bus back to the park headquarters, retrieved our car and returned to our lodge. After lunch and some recuperation for our feet and knees, we wandered across the main road to the Ranger Station to look at two small waterfalls and a walk on a portion of the rainforest boardwalk in the area. Cradle Mountain, being toward the westerly side of Tasmania, is wetter than the areas we traveled through yesterday. We were told some of the areas to the south of the park have 300 days of rain in a year, whereas the eastern side of Tasmania gets rainfall in amounts not much different than what we receive in Northern California.
After this, we got back in car and drove a kilometer or two to a wildlife conservation establishment called Devils@Cradle. This facility is dedicated to preserving Tasmanian Devils and two species of quolls (another marsupial a bit smaller than the devils). We took a one hour tour of the facility and learned many incredible facts about these native animals. For example, 80% to 90% of the native Tasmanian Devils have been lost in the last thirty years due to a highly transmittable tumor disease. It is true that these animals once lived in mainland Australia, but they currently exist in the wild only in Tasmania.
This facility and others have breeding programs to try to protect and replenish the species. At the current time, they are unable to release the devils back in the wild but are hoping for a vaccine being tested to be successful to allow them to do so. Later we would visit another facility that had released some devils on an island where there was no infected population.
Some Tasmanian devils: upper right shows one that really liked the keeper--asking to be picked up. Lower right is one of the devils available for cuddling.
The two species of quolls (spotted and eastern) at the facility are also endangered, but they can be released back into the wild where the habitat permits. After the tour, we spent about forty minutes without another staff person meeting three juvenile devils who we were able to see up close and pet. We were told that between the ages of one and two years old, they become too ornery to be handled. This was a very enjoyable experience.
This is a spotted quoll. The quolls were shy
and very difficult to photograph.
Tomorrow is predicted to be much cooler and rainy, so we are not yet sure of what we are going to do! Everyone in Tasmania always discusses the weather with a shrug, you often get three seasons in a day (well, spoiler alert, tomorrow will be winter, winter and more winter, even in late summer).
This is the map for our time spent in Cradle Mountain.
February 1, 2026
Today the weather was as promised, and then some! After breakfast, and noticing the rain, we decided it would be a good time to do our laundry at the lodge. Once we put our clothes in the washer, the rain had lightened up enough that we decided to walk on a portion of one of the rainforest trails at our lodge, the King Billy Track. After ten minutes or so, the rain got heavier, and we decided to turn around. The trail was in deep forest with tall trees on a boardwalk. We saw several marsupials. But we never made it to the tallest King Billy tree (a conifer, not a gum) at the end of the track.
A view of the King Billy Pines track, and a pademelon, below.
We then enjoyed our warm room and finished our laundry. Since it was still very cold and rain would come and go every 20 minutes, and our room had no WiFi, once the laundry was dry, we spent some time in the Lodge lobby, sitting by a fireplace checking email, reading etc.
After lunch, there was another break in the rain, so we walked on the path called Enchanted Walk, which meanders along the Pencil Pines River, another one of the designated Great Short Walks of Tasmania. It had more wallabies, plus ferns, mosses and other rainforest plants.
Here’s a Bennett’s Wallaby
grazing near the Enchanted Walk.
Next we took an escorted and guided vehicle tour of the park, which was somewhat abbreviated due to the weather! We had snow, sleet, hail, lightning and thunder, and the wind chill factor was 30°F or colder. We therefore elected to spend most of our time on this tour indoors, first visiting the Dove Lake Shelter which we had walked through quickly yesterday, taking time now to see the exhibits. The fairly new concrete structure has a panoramic view of the lake, which today had white caps; yesterday the lake was calm.
After that, we drove to the Waldheim Chalet. On the drive up, we got a glimpse of a wombat grazing on the mountainside, as well as several more wallabies and pademelons. The chalet is a historic structure and was instrumental in the establishment of Cradle Mountain National Park. While enjoying a hot beverage with our guide, we listened to an audio presentation about the history of the Chalet and its founder, Gustav Weindorfer, and perused the exhibits and memorabilia. We then drove back to the Lodge. Since the rain had stopped for a bit, we tried to find a platypus our guide had seen below nearby Pencil Pine Falls. Alas, our spotting skills were not as good as the guide’s! Here is a photo of the falls.
We prepared for an early dinner, since we would be taking a nighttime wildlife spotting tour afterwards. Here’s to hoping the rain stops! Our phone weather application predicts the temperature during our tour will feel like 26° (F)!
After a nice dinner next to the fireplace, we took a tour in a safari vehicle with 8 or 9 other guests. We left the lodge at about sundown and there was a break in the rain, so we were optimistic. We drove slowly into the park and in the first 15 minutes we caught sight of several wallabies along the way.
The guide parked the vehicle at Ronny Creek, where we could just see a dusting of snow on the mountains in the dwindling light. We bundled up the best we could, took torches and spotlights and set out on a boardwalk into a meadow. This is prime habitat for nighttime feeding by wombats, and we saw at least a dozen of the fuzzy marsupials. One or two of them came right up to us on the boardwalk. One nuzzled our guide’s shoe and another allowed tour guests to pet it. In the low light, we did not get the best photos. But it was still great to see these animals up close. Here are two photos, such as they are.
After about a half hour, it started to snow, so we rushed back to the vehicle. The wind was howling and our phone said the temperature felt about like 20° F. We drove slowly back to the lodge and saw a pademelon and a quoll that darted across the road and avoided becoming roadkill. We were really cold but were glad we got to see wombats up close.
Crossing our fingers to see more new (for us) marsupial species during our travels.
Proof it was cold! And this
was two hours beforehand.
February 2, 2026
We woke up to sunny skies and decided that after breakfast, we would try to get a photo of Dove Lake in the sunshine. After checking out of our hotel, we walked across the street to the Ranger Station, where we caught a bus to Dove Lake. When we got off the bus, we said to ourselves, it might be sunny, but it is still darn cold. The wind was really blowing, making it feel much colder than the low 40’s that it was. We therefore satisfied ourselves with a few photos from the visitor’s shelter. A small amount of yesterday’s snow was still on the upper peaks, but most had melted. Here are photos of the lake in the sun.
We took the bus back to our lodge to retrieve our car and start our drive to our next destination, located on the north coast. We very much enjoyed our visit to this park despite the weather challenges.
