Tully and Cradle Mountain

Tully is perfectly placed to explore the mountains in the West of Tassie, and we stopped for 2 nights at the Tully Motel where they gave us a motel room for a hostel price. Sitting on the shores of Lake Rosebery it has great mountain views and a friendly atmosphere with a cosy bar area with a roaring log fire. Good thing too as it was freezing.

We got up early and sat down to breakfast at 7am. The manager came up to us and asked us what we were doing that day.
"We’re going to climb up Cradle Mountain" we answered.
"And what are you going to do with the rest of the day?" he said oddly. The climb was in the guide book as an 8 hour walk - I was pretty much planning on lying down with a few cold beers for the rest of the day. We told him that that we reckoned it was going to take us all day.
"What do you want to go to the top for?" he asked.
Cradle Mountain is the region’s most famous landmark. Climbing Cradle Mountain is a must-do activity. The guy clearly hadn’t heard of the Tasmanian Tourist Board’s official policy of being enthusiastic towards people coming to admire the beauty of their island. We told him that we’d heard the views were spectacular.
"You won’t see anything from up there, not today."
"Really?"
"It’s cloudy and you won’t see anything. You want to do a nice walk round Dove Lake instead."
I was dismayed. The Dove Lake walk takes about two hours and is totally flat. It’s the one that the tour groups and fat people do. Besides, it was sunny outside and looked like a pretty good day for a climb.
"Well, we’ll go up there anyway and check it out, and if it’s really cloudy we might do another walk." We said, not wanting to change our plans.
"And you’ve got up far too early, it’ll be cold and cloudy. You want to take a few hours, then go up there."
"Well, thanks for the advice." We said
He shrugged.
"You’re on your own." And with that he moved off to clear some plates from another table.

Yes, we were on our own. I certainly wouldn’t have invited him to come with us even if we had wanted company. I doubt he’d be a barrel of laughs on an 8 hour hike. Plus, had he not seen my choice of footwear? Walking boots! Clearly I was an experienced rambling-hiker! I also had chocolate bars and a compass, and you don’t get much more prepared for a mountain than that. Before he could come back and give us any more surly advice we got in the car and went to see it for ourselves.

The man at the parks information looked at his real time webcam that was pointing at Cradle Mountain. He could have looked out the window, but either he had neck mobility problems or he thought a webcam was more impressive.
"It’s cloudy." He told us. We looked over at the monitor and there was indeed a thin layer of cloud on the summit.
"Will it clear?" we asked. He rubbed his chin with his hand.
"Might do. It’s very changeable."
"So can we go up?"
"You can go and have a look. But if it starts raining come straight down."

With that we started the walk. Two and a bit hours later we reached the base from which you start the climb and the cloud had cleared and the sun was out, so we started the ascent.
Now Cradle Mountain is pretty steep. On the walking map they have marked the paths at the bottom of the mountain as "Narrow and Steep" where applicable, but they didn’t bother to do it with the climb to the summit which surprised Aimee and Marie. I was rather of the opinion that marking it was a bit unnecessary.

1. it’s called Cradle Mountain which should give a fairly good indication of the sort of terrain you’re going to encounter, and
2. When you look up to the summit from the base, you’re looking up at an angle of 45+ degrees so there’s definitely going to be a large proportion of "up" in the climb.
   

It’s made of loads of large dolomite boulders that you clamber over, and there’s no path, no steps and no handrails, and if you do fall you’re going to fall an awfully long way (because it’s so steep you see!). So really it is a climb and not just a walk like you get on most sanitised-for-tourists mountains. We all agreed that it’s probably the most dangerous thing we’ve done since we’ve been travelling.
But we made good progress and with a few minor hiccups we were at the summit in about 2 hours. The views were indeed spectacular. I made sure to take lots of photos to show the manager of the hostel when we returned that evening. It was also very warm and we had lost our hats, gloves and layers of clothing and were down to t-shirts. We hung around on the top for a bit then climbed down, which proved equally scary as climbing up. When back at the base we decided to go back a different way around the top of the hills surrounding the lakes (another 3 and a half hours). Great views, but by then we just wanted to get back to the car and get the hell out of there. What did we do with the rest of the day? I did some work in the hostel.