Tas - Lake St Clair

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After a very cold night - even colder than in Cradle Mountain, i was wearing 2 pairs of socks, 3 trousers and 5t tops and a jumper, woke up so many times, ended up using our gas stove to warm the tent up, we had breakfast with Simon and Fi.
We decided to go on the 5hr walk on the Shadow Lake Circuit. You could also catch a ferry up to Echo Point or Narcissus Bay and walk down along the lake, which is part of the Overland Track. There was also a walk up to Mount Rufus but that was a 7 hour walk!
Lake St Clair lies at the Southern End of Cradle Mountain and is part of the Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area. Carved by ice during several glaciations over the last 2 million years, this is the deepest lake in Australia and the headwaters of the Derwent River. The aboriginal people called it Leeawuleena = sleeping water.
We left at 10.40am, the first hour was through the forest, walking up muddy walkways and over tree roots. Then we walked over a marshy bit of land, there were boardwalks there to stop you from sinking! Then down along Shadow Lake, it was more open here and then sun even decided to come out and play! It was quite an easy walk from there, sometimes across stepping stones. We took a little detour to Platypus Bay, didn’t see any, and then went back to camp. It only took us a total of 3hrs50 ! That walk up cradle Mountain must have helped!!! As we were back so early we sat down by the warm fire and read our books for a bit until the others got back.
Fi and Si arrived around 6pm, they had caught the Ferry and walked down along the Lake. We then got introduced to Charlie, an English guy from Bristol who had arrived in Tas about 2 weeks previously and was cycling his way to the UK over 2 years! We all went and got a few beers to have that evening and they were telling us about their day.... as they were walking along the very overgrown path they suddenly saw a VERY big tiger snake, we saw the picture, it was huge! Curled up on an old tree right by the path. Their first instinct was to frighten it away rather than walk past it but then realised once it was on the floor that they couldn’t see their own feet let alone a snake!!! So they got Charlie - yes that’s right, the Englishman, to go first!!!! Well they all survived to tell the tale at least!
We had a really good evening!

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