Lost World walk

Michael was keen to go for a walk on the mountain today. I suggested a short walk so I could keep him company and not take too big a chunk out of my Sunday. The Lost World track looked like a good one on the map - steep but interesting.

We can see the Lost World area from our house. The small peak is Mt Arthur
(I think I have told people in the past that it's Collins Cap but that is quite a bit further away)

I imagined a track of hundreds of steps, in fact there was not one. Instead, think of large boulders, with arrows scratched on them to keep you going in the right direction.

My guide, the nimble-footed Michael, at the top of the descent.

The Big Bend, Pinnacle Road - we parked the car near the white car in the centre.
The first 10 metres of the track was a peat bog, and after that is a dry rock scramble.

We descended for about 20 minutes. The Lost World Track meets the Old Hobartians track down below, but that is closed still since the August storms. I was happy just to get that far and turn around. In fact it was such a steep and laborious descent that a picked a spot with a good view and told Michael I would wait there for him. He went down to explore.

The 'Organ Pipes' on the eastern face of Mt Wellington/kunanyi are huge dolerite columns.
Here further north there are smaller ones – I always think of these as the Little Organ Pipes.

Michael is at the very centre of this pic. You can see where at some stage of geological time
a lot of the columns fell and smashed. They are distinctly hexagonal in section.

The climb back up begins

I am probably haunted a bit by my near-miss when I got lost walking in India. I just did a search of the blog and I realise now I haven't written about it here, except for this tiny snippet. Anyway it has made me uber-cautious about getting lost or injured walking out in the bush. But now I know the lay of the land here, I'll be happy to come back and push on further.

The amazing part was how fast it was to get back up to the top. The process of choosing foot- and hand-holds on the way down is so slow, that it actually is way quicker going up.