I have a sense of walking back in time when I journey into the bush, and especially at Cradle Mountain. One only has to walk a short distance from the Dove Lake car park and the camera clicking tourists to find oneself immersed in a timeless, primordial world of ancient rock, thousand-year-old trees and Jurassic-age mountains breaching the horizon. When I am there I feel as if I am stepping out of the distractions of day-to-day life and back into the calm of an ancient present and continuum.

As I walk the track towards little Lake Lilla I feel as if I am on a tightrope of time, and all around me is a living museum of the past. It is a museum that has been left largely undisturbed, leaving us able to witness the natural unfolding of life, giving us a glimpse of natural history, of a world not dominated by humans, of a world still flourishing and renewing itself every day. I want to jump off the rope, into the past.

The evocative, singsong sigh of a currawong is carried across the landscape. A creek chuckles to itself as tea-coloured water slips and slurps over pebbles and stones. Pencil pines stand perfectly still, gnarled by the elements, beautiful with branches reaching for the sky, like dancers frozen in a graceful moment. This could be a thousand years ago.

The fresh air of the mountains feels good in my lungs. It is redeeming.

I always feel renewed and like I am coming home when I walk in the bush. When I walk into a wild area I am suddenly transformed. I feel at ease, natural. My perspective on life improves immediately: suddenly life is good and all things are possible and my petty worries and concerns peel away like autumn leaves.

Cradle Mountain is my favourite homecoming, for it is here that I first got hooked on the Tasmanian bush. Here is the place I wandered to quite by chance (on a recommendation from a traveller in Alaska) to fall in love with the wilderness (and an Australian girl), and (almost) walked the Overland Track in 1982.

This is a place I return to again and again. To sit by Wombat Pool and reflect and reckon on life. To climb up to the saddle and look across Crater Lake and feel that surge of optimism and inspiration that one gets when one gazes across mountain landscapes. These are timeless mountains that always inspire and never disappoint.

. . .

I first arrived at Cradle Mountain on a balmy March day in 1982 and aimed to start the famous Overland Track the next day. “The weather is great. This will be a piece of cake,” I thought. The next day it was pouring rain, the track was a river and all my gear was soaked from setting up my tent in what had become a bog overnight. So I decided to put the trip off for a day and go to the nearby Pencil Pine Lodge to dry out and have a cup of tea. There I met a girl who invited my to travel with her and some friends by car around Tasmania. I accepted the invitation, thinking I could return to do the Overland Track another day. That day came – in 2016.

It has taken me 33 years to complete that famous hike. But what’s 33 years in the face of eons of geology and beauty? Over the past three decades I have explored both ends of the park, bushwalking all around Cradle Mountain, through the nearby Walls, Pine Valley, up into the Labyrinth … but never did it seem to work out to be the right time, never did all the logistics line up, to do the full Overland Track. There never seemed enough time to fit it in. Imagine being short of time for so long. What was I thinking?

All changed last summer when I made a commitment to complete the hike. This time I would do it with my wife (the same girl I met that fateful morning at the Pencil Pine Lodge) and our two teenagers and some good friends. Finally we were going to bag the Overland – a hike that had haunted me for more than half my life.

. . .

As we started the hike, a sense of timelessness hit me. I felt 24 years old again. The bush looked exactly the same, the spires of Cradle Mountain looked just as haunting, and with just a few steps I felt I was simply continuing a walk I had started a long time ago – or was it only yesterday? Time didn’t seem to matter in the bush.

I strode up the path and it felt good to be renewing my original youthful intention and continuing my journey. The years in between my steps vanished; the years that had passed were like seconds as my thoughts resumed where they had left off.

Deja vu struck too, as the hike started on a day not unlike that March day in 1982 – it was raining. The start of the track was like walking in a creek and by time we got up to Marion’s there was little visibility and it was snowing. But there was no going back this time: I had the momentum of a family around me, decent gear and no young girl to divert me from my mission. Life was ahead, not behind.

We plodded on, up into the fog and flurries, around the back of Cradle and down into the sublime beauty of Waterfall Valley. And suddenly the weather lifted, the sun appeared in golden shafts, and it was all worth it. It was worth the longest steps, the longest wait of my life.

. . .

We took our time on the hike and it lived up to everything anyone has ever written about the Overland. It has it all: superb views, subtle grandeur and microscopic beauty in the lichens, tarns and buttongrass butterflies. Grand vistas, wombats and echidnas. Waterfalls and high mountain lakes. Exhilarating swims in cold water. Long summer sunsets and star-filled nights. Challenging treks and easy strolls. Silence, solitude and family bonding. The Overland offers it all.

A highlight of the trip was tramping to the top of Ossa, the highest peak in Tasmania. We got lucky, a sunny day, and free of our heavy packs for the day trip, my son, his best friend and I ran up the flanks to the top. The view was spectacular of course – here was Tasmania at our feet, stretching 360 degrees in beauty: waves of mountain ridges, green valleys, blue lakes and a bright sky above. We felt on top of the world.

The Overland Track lived up to all expectations. It is indeed, as the brochures say, world-class. No one could be disappointed with the diverse beauty in the wilderness that one tramps through.

There are, however, two myths about the Overland Track that are worth correcting. Firstly, it is said the hike is an easy walk, and secondly that the hike is a highway, crawling with people. Neither is true. The Overland is not an easy hike if you are carrying your own gear, a tent and food for a week. The hike tests one daily with steep climbs, day-long treks between camping spots, muddy and rooted tracks and hard-footed stretches of boardwalk that leave one’s legs aching by the end of the day. The teenagers flew through the hike yes, but it is a walk that most adults should not take lightly – one needs fitness to enjoy and complete it safely.

The other myth about the hike being a highway is wrong too. Because numbers are limited (one must book months ahead), the number of hikers on the track at any one time is strictly regulated. Importantly, everyone hikes in the same direction so one never has to pass anyone. Since everyone breaks camp and leaves at different times in the morning (the Germans leave first at light, the French pack up after their coffees at 7.30, and middle-aged Australians like me leave after 9am), one can hike all day and mingle only with one’s companions. And since we had youngsters speeding ahead and various forms of dawdling nature lovers, I found myself mostly on my own or with only one or two family members.

. . .

The Overland Track is not a highway, but a road less travelled – and this makes all the difference.

. . .

When we arrived at Lake St Clair we felt, as one always does upon completing a great journey, a mile high. I had finally done it. We had lifted those heavy packs for a week and no one had complained. We had bagged Ossa and I had bagged the hike of my life. Something had been vindicated in me and I felt complete. I could sleep well for the rest of my life now, for I had at last completed my mission.

I had walked into the future and walked back in time, with the same legs, on the same track – just 32 years and one step apart. I felt part of a continuum, of my own journey and that of the landscape. The land had continued on without me, allowed me back for a glimpse, and then let me go again.

The land now continues on with its timeless ways, its daily evolution of slow-growing pines, giggling streams and spired peaks silently wearing down, while I busily run around and try to find the time to plan my next trip. I would not wait three decades to hike there again. Time is there to find, not to lose.

This article was first published in issue 85 of Forty South magazine. 

Don Defenderfer is a native of San Francisco who once went on a holiday to Alaska where he met an Australian who told him to visit Tasmania. So he did, and while here he met a woman. That was 30 years ago. He was state coordinator for Landcare Tasmania for many years, a job that allowed him to be inspired by not only the beauty of the Tasmanian landscape but by the many people that are trying to repair and renew it. He has a Masters Degree in Social Ecology and a Bachelor of Environmental Studies with a minor in writing. He has published three volumes of poetry, and his work has appeared in newspapers and periodicals, including The New York Times and The Australian.