I love my 'backyard' in Tasmania. Cradle Mountain is where I wander to rejuvenate. It fuels my creative juices and soothes my itchy feet when I cannot be wandering further from home.
Last weekend, I climbed to the top of Cradle Mountain and sat on the edge of the dolorite columns at the peak, gazing in awe at the view. 360 degrees of mountains upon mountains with the only signs of humans being the Overland Track below me and tiny people crawling along it. (oh - and all the other dozens of crazies like me who scrambled up to the top of the mountain too)
It was harder than I expected to reach the top. I knew there was "rock scrambling" involved but some of the rocks were bigger than my legs and arms were long and it was quite the effort to pull myself up. If you look closely at the photo below you can just make out a woman sitting in the gap to the left of the tower of rock on the right. She is waiting for her husband to return from the peak. She was younger than me and decided that the climbing was too hard for her. The 'track' goes more or less straight down from where she is sitting and then up again past where I took this photo from. I took some comfort from her presence thinking that if I fell she would see me and get help.
The first white woman to climb Cradle Mountain was Kate Weindorfer in 1910, aged 46. She ascended wearing a long dress and multiple petticoats. How much harder it must have been for her than it was for me! But it is no wonder that her husband Gustav exclaimed,
"It
is magnificent! It must become a national park so people can enjoy it for all
time to come."
