Cradle Mountain

My next stop would be cradle mountain national park. An absolute stunner. I drove an hour into the mountains stopping at waterfalls and view points along the way. The temp has dropped since the storm and into the elevation to a chill 50 degree high and a low of 32. I picked up some gloves at the visitor center and set up my tent and drove into the park for sunset. At sunset is the wombat stampede. On a trail there are none and all of the sudden you look around and you realize all the rocks I. The distance are wombats! They are so cute, and generally quite unbothered. Because the shuttle service ends at 6 and sunset is at 7 there were no other people out there. Just me and 25 wombats wandering though the prairies. I even saw a mom and baby which was sooooo cute. I saw a quick flash of fur and I wasn’t really sure if I was it at first. I just saw the mom, but I had a hunch and I sat on the boardwalk and watched and after 10 minutes the tiny baby came out. It was climbing all over its mom and sliding off. It was so adorable. I watched them until they wandered away and it was starting to get dark so I headed back to camp. On my drive out I saw a Tassie devil run across the road! Which was so cool. 

The campground I stayed at was quite fancy and had a common area with a covered kitchen and a few fireplaces to hang out in the evenings. It was really nice and warm despite the 0° or 32° temperature outside. It was also perfectly situated five minutes from the park entrance, which was very convenient as the next morning I was meeting, another botanist I met online to go look at plants at the park early in the morning.

Quintin is a French botanist also on working holiday in Tasmania. Well he hasn’t found any botany work. He has been doing farm work along the way and learning about Tasmanian Flora. He is planning on spending his entire first year in Tasmania and getting to know the plants in the area which is super cool. Spending time in one area is a great way to get to know the plants he’ll surely learn and no more intimately the plants and Tasmania than I will know in any region in Australia, spending the time and getting to know the plants in an area is really neat and it’s such a cool thing to get to do of course it means that he doesn’t get to see nearly as much of the country as I do.

We took the 8:30 bus to Dove Lake and began with the iconic walk around it. At the end of our walk we had gone, probably a mile or two along the edge of the lake, and we wanted to add some more time to our trip we decided to climb Marion Peak. It was a bit of a scramble at times, but we stopped often to look at plants and lichen and mosses, and the incredible views along the way we had lunch and watched some birds. Watch us eat our lunch, which was pretty entertaining. Clearly the birds thought they were going to get fed but they did not get fed. Marion was really beautiful and it was a really wonderful day of hiking. It’s so nice to go out with someone who is equally excited and interested in plants and nature and doesn’t have to tolerate you stopping to look at things and has the same level of excitement as you, it’s been a while since I’ve gone with another botanist, and I really enjoyed learning from him and talking about different plants in total we hiked 7.4 miles and inclined 1300 feet it was a big day. Since he is also camping, I invited him to share my campsite and we had dinner and drank wine and had a good chat about our travels and life.

The next day we did a another long cool hike at Dove Canyon. The first half of the walk is through this dense canopied, but open understory forest and the forest is absolutely carpeted with mosses and lichens. We had so much fun taking lots of pictures and looking at the different lichens and plants. Almost the entire walk is boardwalk, which is really neat. It minimizes our impact on the environment, but it also keeps you from getting muddy or having potentially rolled ankles. The boardwalk after the mossy forest went to button grass prairies they’re so beautiful. The buttongrass creates a bear monoculture where it grows, dense in large hummock, covering the landscape in a greenish yellow. The hummocks can be nearly waist high and the tops of the seed heads at face level. It doesn’t appear that the wombats eat the buttongrass, as the areas where the wombats frequent (as evident by their poo) is often so short it looks like a manicured lawn. The buttongrass does seem to provide protection and pathways for smaller creatures though. I occasionally caught glimpses of smaller (grapefruit sized) fuzzy critters dashing between the hummocks. Another dense monoculture in the area are these ferns, which I haven’t identified yet, but also form these dense hummocks in a monoculture. Walking through it it’s easy to imagine that you are in some fancy Victorian garden or landscaped area. It looks pristine in an almost unnatural way. It’s very interesting. The boardwalk ended at a limestone hill we had to climb, and climb indeed we did. It was no simple walk, but a scramble up rocks naturally graffiti’d with a diversity of lichens which was so incredible. At the peak we looked out over the steep ravine with a river rushing hundreds of feet below us and saw interlocking hills of buttongrass prairies, ferns lawns, and eucalyptus flatwoods. It was incredibly gorgeous. We completed our first hike after a few hours and returned to the ranger station for a picnic lunch before heading out for our next walk. 

The next (final) two walks we had were short but lovely. One was called the enchanted walk, where you walk through some more beautiful buttonwood prairies and mossy forests. Dotted through the walk you can see tons of wombat and other creature burrows which is so endearing. The walk also had a bunch of tunnels (probably for kids) that we crawled through and the insides of the tunnels had paintings of native plants/animals/insects identified on the walls. It was great, we then used our new knowledge to identify stuff as we walked along! Our final loop was the king Billy pine trail. It took us up to one of the biggest king Billy pines in the park, which in a special pine (Lagostrobus franklinii) which only occurs in Tasmania. I’ve never heard of that genus before and will have to learn more about it soon. In total we hiked 7.8 miles and 530 feet elevation gain. After two days of good long hikes I was exhausted. 

Both days we saw tons of different endemic species to Tasmania and the alpine areas. It was so great, and even better having a fellow enthusiast identifying and being excited about the species we are finding. After two great days we parted ways, with hopes of crossing paths again for future hikes. I headed east towards Mersey Creek while he headed north towards Stanley looking for farm work.