Day 1; Ronnie Creek to Cradle Mtn to Waterfall Valley Hut

it's the big day....start of the Overland Track. Our stay in the caravan park wasn't too comfortable so we are easily up by 7:30 am, start the day with oatmeal and coffee, before donning our packs.

We load on our packs. Nathan's weighed 23 kg; 25 with water (55 lbs). Mine is 21 kg, 23 kg with water, almost 50 lbs. WATER is HEAVY! Each of us were hiking with 2 liters--so an additional 4.4 pounds of water every day.

We walk from the caravan park to the bus stop outside the cradle mountain park. After about 10 minutes, I'm thinking, "man this pack is heavy, I've got another 45 miles of this!" Bad sign! Once we are on the bus, we are excited that we are the only hikers on the bus. It means that our hike won't be like standing in line at Disneyland.

We arrive at the Ronnie Creek bus stop, the official start of the overland track. While we are taking the documentary photo above, a private touring company pulls up and unloads 12 hikers. Hello disneyland!

The hike starts in a highland valley covered in lichen, moss, and button grass with streams wandering throughout--prime wombat country. To protect the grassland, the hike starts on a boardwalk--its like a freeway and Nathan and I get a head start on the tour group. After a few km, we start a gentle climb up to Crater Lake. We stop for a brief pause to put on our Gaiters (heavy canvas shin guards to protect against snake bites) at the Cradle Falls, where the tour group catches up with us. As they are resting in the climb, we head up hill trying to put a little distance between us and them . From here it gets steeper climbing 300m in less than a km, so the tour group catches us again by the time we reach Kitchen Hut (our lunch stop), where we drop our packs for the climb up Cradle Mountain.

From Kitchen Hut, Cradle Mountain is a 320 m climb over 2.4 km. That sounded pretty steep, but after I took off my pack, I felt so much lighter I was sure I could manage 2.4 km walking. Foolishly, I hadn't realised that about 1/3 of the way up the mountain, you stop walking and start scrambling over giant granite boulders. This continues for a long time....just when you get to the top of what you can see, there's a saddle so you have to crab-walk down the boulders for .5 km before you start crawling over the really steep stuff on the way to the top.

We came from all way down there....pretty steep huh? On the far side of the lake, there's a little parking lot that you can just see in this photo - then up from that there's a belt of dark green trees. If you follow that around to the left, well, that's almost at the beginning of the trail. And we're about 1/2 way through the first day. I can't believe I'm still smiling at this point. Here we are approaching the summit! It was a little bit like the cover of the Led Zepplin album Houses of the Holy, only steeper.

By the time we get to the top, I'm too tired to look around.

After resting at the summit, we crabwalk down the rocks until we are able to hike again. Despite the fact that we still have 5 km to hike to Waterfall Valley hut, I'm grateful to finally be able to walk again. Even though its all downhill from here, the last few km take on that "are we there yet?" sort of feeling. My knees, feet, and BUTT are super sore from the cradle mountain climb, so when we get to Waterfall Valley where we are supposed to be camping, we collapse and decide to stay in the trekking huts provided. These enclosed shelters have picnic tables and a mattress free wood platform to place your sleeping bag on.

We are the envy of the other campers in the hut as Nathan makes his famous TVP burritos (with a special treat...FIRE SAUCE from Taco Bell. THANKS GRETCHEN!)...that is until we find out that fellow walkers Jo & Ben are carrying all freeze-dried food and their packs are 7 kg lighter than EACH of ours. Then we envy them a bit!

Exhausted we discover one fatal mistake: Our thermarest mattress pads BOTH have slow leaks (and slowly deflate over a period of a half an hour). Since some friends had borrowed them and had to use them to get out of the sand after they got stuck during a camping trip, we had made a point to test them before our trip. The leaks were just slow enough that we didn't detect them during our testing, but fast enough to deflate before we could fall asleep.

It's going to be a long night.