Australia: Day 133 - TAS - Cradle Mountain

We woke super early to get a good start on the mountain. The weather was supposed to be fine in the morning with some clouds building in the afternoon. It was pretty overcast when we left for the park but we decided to head out anyway. It was a cold start to a long day. The first leg of our journey took us up to Crater Lake and Marion's Lookout. We couldn't see much though because we were literally in the clouds. It was like a mist white-out, you literally couldn't see more than a couple of meters. We came along some other hikers and that made us feel a lot better about the situation, knowing someone else was coming along behind us in case we got lost or walked off the mountain or anything - haha. We took a snack break in the kitchen hut (a wooden shack/shelter built for emergencies) just before the peak climb and decided to go for the top even if visibility was poor. It was a tough climb, way harder than I expected. The pictures do no justice of how steep and big the boulders were that we needed to scramble over to get to the top. When we finally reached the top, it was completely white - we were completely surrounded by cloud, pretty freaky. Eventually we gave up that it might clear and started our descent. Of course when we were about a quarter of the way down the clouds broke and we could see. Figures. Anyway we were still high enough to get the effect so I really don't feel like we missed out too badly. We holed up behind some boulders at the bottom of the climb for lunch and spent nearly an hour hiding from the wind. We decided to loop down and take a "rough and steep" path down to Dove Lake and hike out along the board walk. It was extremely pretty and the day had turned into a beautiful one - but it took forever! When it was all said and done we had spent 8 hours on the mountain. We stopped at the visitor's center on the way out and then started our drive to Mt. Field National Park. It was a long drive, 5 hours or so. We stopped and made dinner at Lake St. Clair National Park and were nearly attacked by blood thirsty wallabies. Okay, maybe not blood thirsty but they were certainly bold. The remaining 2 hours of the drive were in darkness, so I had to take it super slow to avoid killing anything, but I got to see a ton of cool critters in the headlights. No devils though. We finally reached the campsite at 12:15 am or so. We rushed to quickly set up the tent in the dark and then all passed out. What a day!!