The Overland Track

We undertook the epic hike from Cradle Mt. to Lake St Clair, the Overland Track. It is a 75km hike not including side trips and is one of the top 10 hikes in the world through National Heritage Listed country.

Day 1:

I have not overnight hiked before and I was very nervous. We purchased weird food from Woolies like dehydrated potato (called Deb by those in the know), dehydrated peas and skim milk powder. I purchased the essentials; fredo frogs and snakes. It soon becomes clear I  know nothing about overnight hiking when our wonderful friend Sarah says she will lend us her Trangia. "Great!" I said. "What is a Trangia?" It turn out it is a little cooking stove. Clearly I am in way over my head.

Mark and the broken tent

I looked down at the gear I am wearing.
# Hiking shoes -blue
# Cargo Pants from Just Jeans - black
# Long sleeve shirt from Katmandu said to be quick drying - also blue
# Borrowed Gortex Jacket - blue
# Big backpack that I cannot lift - blue again.

It occured to me that if I had white pants I would look like a smurf! Perfect.

I looked over at Mark and he actually looks cool, how is that possible?

My pack was about 6kg, it feels heavy. Mark's was about 12kg, I felt like a pussy.

We catch a bus to Cradle Mt from Lake St Clair so that when (if) we finish the hike we finish at our car.
Night 1 at Cradle Mt before we even started the hike our tent pole broke. We attempted to fix it with tape. It rained all night and we go wet. Our tent sucked.

Day 2: We started the hike.

We caught the shuttle bus down to the car park. As the bus driver was unloading our backpacks he looked at mine and said; "That is a terrible pack, you will not make it 3km."
OH MY GOD! I freaked out. What an awful thing to say. It was an 75km hike, and I am not going to make 3 km. HELL!

We started anyway and as I looked at my watch and it said I had been walking for a total of 8 mins I thought that the stupid bus driver was correct. I could not do this. We stopped every half an hour and ate all our lollie snakes. Fail.

Hiker Smurf

There are huts all along the track and we made it to the first, Waterfall, by about 1pm. We had lunch; Mountain Bread and peanut butter. It tasted AMAZING because I was so damn hungry. We hiked on and the views were spectacular. Thinking that this was country that you could never drive on, that you can only walk through kept me going. It was very liberating to have everything we needed on our backs but it was also frightening. What if we ran out of food? Oh Hell I thought not for the first time.

A long way to go!

That night we made it to Windemere Hut. The huts are warm and dry. It had 4 tables in one room and bunks in another. It also had platforms to set up your tent. As our tent was a fail we grabbed a bunk. When I say bunk I really mean a piece of board that we rolled out a mat and sleeping bag on. There was no privacy and no where to wash. We cooked Deb (potato), peas and a can of soup and again it was awesome as we were so hungry.

There was a snorer in our hut but we got some sleep.
19km covered.

More to come

Amazing views!

Love Krystal