Our Great Adventure: Day 126 22/01/2015

It rained heavily overnight but luckily we woke to high cloud and decided to walk to Mount Field West, the highest peak in the National Park. After breakfast and packing up we headed back up the dirt track, this time heading a bit further along to Lake Denton where the walk starts. This part of the park is actually a low key ski resort although it hasn't opened for a number of years due to lack of snow. Ski chalets and tow lifts are visible on the hillside. The walk heads up through the trees, where we spotted a wallaby, to open moorland above Lake Seal. Long sections of the path are broadwalks to protect the delicate alpine plants with the added benefit of protecting your boots and trousers. From here you go up to the ridge on the Rodway Range where the boulder fields begin and continue as you drop to a deep saddle before climbing back up past Naturalist Peak to Mount Field West. The summit is an isolate rocky tower, with plunging steep cliffs on three sides, on the western edge of the park and provides lovely views over the many peaks of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. The return route to the car park is by the same route and by the time we got back we'd really had enough of boulders (Diane certainly had). On the way down we past a couple who took our photo - apparently they very rarely see people on the track and wanted a momentum of when they had! It started to rain as we drove down the dirt track making our van decidedly muddy. As it was too late for the cafe at the visitors centre we headed back to the camp site to find that our new neighbours had decided to move our pitch. All a bit odd but we still had somewhere to plug in for the night - and they then had an attack of the possums. Some of the caravans and trucks at the campsite are huge and most have large Australian flags hanging from flag poles as Australia Day approaches. The rain started to fall quite heavily in the evening and we went to bed with the sound of it bouncing on the van roof.