Winterbrook Falls and Black Bluff

A perfect blue-sky autumn day (Tassie perfect - as in not cloudy or raining but still freezing cold...) inspired us to take a trip back to Winterbrook Falls and complete the hike we never quite started a couple of weeks ago (after driving most of the way, finding the last bit of road closed, walking a kilometre into the trailhead and then discovering that we didn't have enough daylight to walk the track itself...)

The walk-in to the falls is along an old tramway through proper Tasmanian rainforest (giant trees. lush green and everything covered with a million different kinds of moss). There were remnants of the tramway still to be seen (with a bit of imagination in some places) as well as a profusion of colourful toadstools and fungi necessitating lots of camera stops.

The track eventually left the tramway and climbed steeply beside a (very audible but pretty much invisible) rushing creek until finally breaking out of the rainforest to a vista of the falls themselves plummeting down off the bluff.

Ten minutes more of walking had us back in the forest and to the foot of the falls. 

I'm pretty sure this look means "I want to go that way" ie back to the car...

This was where I realized that after lugging my tripod the whole way, I had neglected to bring the bit that actually attaches it to the camera. So much for those long-exposure rainforest creek shots…

So Ryan saves the day by proving that a rock can do just as good a job as any fancy-pants tripod.

Having seen how tantalizingly close the bluff appeared to be, we decided to take the optional side-track to the top of Black Bluff. This was steeeep (I am sensing a theme with Tassie walks...). The trail took us up through the “Eye of the Needle” – a narrow gap between a couple of massive boulders (marked by a helpful sign reading “Behold – the Eye of the Needle), and onto the plateau itself. 

Once up on the bluff, we started to see patches of snow and then actually managed to be briefly snowed on by a passing cloud that left blue skies in its wake. 

This is Ryan being snowed on (or snowed at to be more precise). Let the record show that he actually appears to be enjoying himself.

This is the snow on its way off the other side of the bluff

We battled up the final climb in howling wind to briefly stop at the ice-covered trig and snap a couple of shots of the amazing view before hurrying back down again.

We headed back on the slightly longer Maxwell’s track, which was a lot more well-defined and a lot less steep than the tramway track (eventually becoming something that was almost recognizable as a fire trail). This ended in a couple of km’s of actual firetrail and a bit of a slog back to the car.

All up, almost 16km of walking and 1300m of climbing.