The Nut

Right at the end of the tarmaced roads on the North West corner of Tassie is the town of Stanley, which is home to an unusual geological phenomenon called "The Nut". Ages ago a sticky lava flow oozed from the ground and filled up a crater in a volcano. As time passed, the surrounding volcano eroded away and left the solidified magma standing as an isolated plateau jutting out into the sea.
And it's great for climbing up!

We arrived in Stanley at around 7:30pm. It quickly became apparent that all the accommodation was booked up and we had nowhere to sleep. I would have been quite happy to sleep in the car, but for some strange reason Aimee and Marie didn’t relish the prospect of sleeping in a small vehicle with me and were keen to find proper beds. As there was no phone reception that far out in Tasmania (or indeed pretty much anywhere outside of Hobart) we looked around for a coin phone. At the main campsite I saw an old Scandanavian couple sitting outside their big trailer tent and asked them if they knew where a payphone was. They both looked confused as English wasn’t their first language. I made the international hand signal for telephone and the man looked worried. He gestured that he didn’t have one. I smiled and left him alone as it crossed my mind that he might have thought he was being the victim of a mugging attempt and that I was demanding he hand over his mobile. It was then that I saw the big red phonebox sitting right in front of him, and we moved off to place some calls. We were there for about an hour phoning round and it became clear that we’d have to drive to another town. During this time the Scandanavian couple had disappeared off to bed – either to call the police on their hidden satellite phone to report the failed robbery, or because they sensed that we were looking for a place to stay and had seen us eyeing up their nice cosy trailer tent.

Finally we found a caravan site down in Crayfish Creek – a 40km drive back the way we’d come – and the very nice owner said she’d hook us up with a nice little caravan at a very reasonable cost. We arrived at about 9:30 and cooked dinner on the gas burner, drank some cheap wine and went to bed. Sleeping there reminded me of the caravan holidays that we used to go on when I was a kid, only as a child, sleeping on a 5 foot bunk bed was a lot of fun. As an adult, you find that half of you is sleeping on the bed, and half of you is hanging over the end, which kind of sucks the fun out of it.

The next day we got up early to go back to Stanley and climb The Nut in daylight.

the view from the top