Heading to Cradle mountain – the place of many wonderful walks. Not the best time to be going there with a painful foot condition  (plantar fasciitis) that could get worse and/or chronic if not rested… Of course, it was decided the Summit was off now, although I suspect given the problems I’d had in the lead up to the trip I was underprepared anyway.  Turns out today was the worst weather of our trip and it would not have been safe to do the summit of Cradle Mountain anyway – the last hour up is a scramble up very large and slippery boulders.  And the summit was in cloud most of the today anyway, so the view would not have been great. Told myself that anyway.

Ended up ‘limiting’ ourselves to about 8 km of walking around the park and strapping up my foot. Most of this was the 5.5km boardwalk through the valley. I am guessing this is fairly new as it didn’t show up in the walks guides I had seen online. It was a magical walk through various types of forest and grassland with fields of miniature ferns, buttongrass and echidnas, birds and wombats galore.  I would highly recommend this boardwalk, even for those not limited.

We also did the pencil pines walk and a section of Dove Lake. The great thing about this park is that you can do this walk and others one way because there are shuttle buses throughout the park. I wasn’t keen on the idea of shuttle buses, but they were great because it limits people taking their cars in and impacting the park, also the roads are narrow, and it would be dangerous to have lots of tourists on them.  They run amazingly frequently, so you can just keep looping back and doing all the various walks.

I’d found that one of the best moves I had to relieve the tightness in my left calf and foot was the ‘downward dog’ – doing this frequently, I felt sorry for my fellow tourists being subjected to the sight of my butt in the air at strange places and times.

This park was beautiful in so many ways – not just the mountain scenery but the amazing array of unusual and interesting plants and so much wildlife! We saw wombats and echidnas galore, as well as birdlife and wallabies.  Late afternoon seemed to be the best time for wombats.