One Stroke · Walking and sketching routes in Australia
The Overland Track
Six days from Cradle Mountain to Lake St Clair, through country that changes character every few hours and weather that changes faster.
The shape of the walk
The standard route runs roughly sixty-five kilometres north to south, typically over six days, with huts and tent platforms at each overnight stop. Most people walk it in that direction because the booking system requires it in season.
The terrain is varied in a way that keeps the days interesting: buttongrass plains, rainforest gullies, alpine plateau, and a long final stretch beside a very large lake. You climb and descend constantly without ever doing one enormous ascent.
Side trips are where the walk earns its reputation. Several summits and waterfalls sit off the main line, adding hours rather than days, and skipping all of them to make time is a common regret.
Booking and the season
During the peak season a booking and a fee are required, numbers are capped, and the direction of travel is fixed. Places are released well in advance and popular dates go quickly.
Outside that season the track is open without the booking requirement and walkable in both directions, but the conditions are serious. Snow is possible in any month and likely in winter, daylight is short, and the plateau in bad weather is genuinely dangerous.
Whichever season, you register your intentions and you carry the gear for the worst case. Rangers are not being dramatic when they insist on this; the highlands have killed well-equipped people.
Weather, which is the whole story
The highlands sit in the path of weather that has crossed a lot of ocean. It can be warm and still in the morning and horizontal sleet by afternoon, in January.
Practically, this means a full waterproof shell, warm layers that work wet, and the discipline to put them on before you are cold and soaked. Hypothermia on this track is usually a chain of small decisions made by someone who was trying not to stop.
It also means accepting that you may cross the highest sections in cloud and see nothing. Building a day of buffer into the plan gives you the option to wait rather than to push.
Huts and platforms
Huts along the route provide shelter, and they are not accommodation in any comfortable sense — they are there so that you survive a bad night. They fill up, and you must carry a tent regardless.
Tent platforms exist at each hut site to keep camping off fragile ground. Free-standing tents or a good set of platform ties make this much easier; pegs do not work on timber.
Hut etiquette is simple and enforced by the group: cook outside where you can, keep noise down early, leave it cleaner than you found it, and carry out everything including food scraps.
What it looks like, for drawing
The pandani and the buttongrass give a foreground texture unlike anywhere on the mainland, and the dolerite columns above the plateau are structural enough to draw with straight lines, which is a relief after a day of scribbling shrubs.
The best drawing conditions are usually the worst walking conditions: low cloud sitting on a ridge gives you tonal separation that a blue-sky day flattens completely.
Carry something that works wet. Pencil on damp paper still marks; most pens do not. A small board and a bulldog clip beat a sketchbook in wind, and wind is not optional here.
Food, water and weight
Six days of food is the bulk of your pack weight. Dehydrated meals are the standard answer, supplemented by things you will actually want to eat on day five, which is rarely another packet of the same thing.
Water is generally available along the route, and the usual practice is to treat or filter it. Carrying a day's supply is unnecessary; carrying a litre between sources is normal.
Weigh the pack before you leave home and then take things out. The difference between fifteen and twenty kilograms over six days is enormous, and most of the excess is clothing nobody wears and food nobody eats.
Getting there and back
The two ends are far apart by road, which makes transport the awkward part. Shuttle services run between the trailheads and the nearest towns in season, and booking them at the same time as the walk avoids an unpleasant surprise on day six.
At the southern end there is a ferry option across the lake that cuts a long, flat final day. Opinions differ on whether that last stretch is worth walking; most people who have done it once take the boat the second time.
Leave a buffer day at the end before any flight. Weather delays are routine, and missing a plane because the highlands decided to snow in February is a standard Tasmanian experience.