Hartz Mountains National Park, TAS

Hartz Mountains National Park was one of the best places we went while we were in Tasmania. The park has beautiful alpine scenery, and there is a trail up to Hartz Peak which takes about 5 hours return. The peak has an altitude of 1255m, and so it’s good to pick a hot day to go up there as it can get very cold, windy, and cloudy up there even in the middle of summer.

After some careful weather forecast monitoring, we headed up there on Boxing Day and got a pretty decent day with warm(ish) temperatures and reasonable visibility. Access to the walking trails was from a car park which was at the end of an 18km slightly rutted, windy gravel road. This seems to be how they like to do it in Tasmania 🙂

Because it was Boxing Day it was a little busy for our liking, but the crowds thinned a bit as we got further along the trail. There were several tarns (lakes) along the way and the first part of the trail was mostly flat, before it headed steeply up towards the top of Hartz Peak. The vegetation was beautiful and it turned out that we were there at the right time of year to see the bright red Tasmanian Waratahs flowering all around us.

The views from the top and all the way up were excellent, even though by the time we reached the summit there were some clouds coming in. After the Hartz Peak trail we had a coffee break (yes, we always carry our own coffee…) and then walked the shorter Lake Osborne trail – which was through similar vegetation to another lake. On the drive out we stopped at Arve Falls and Waratah Lookout (which were nothing special compared to the first two walks)

As this was one of our favourite walks in Tasmania, we did the whole thing again a month later when LB came to visit us in Snug. This time the weather was even better and clearer, but sadly the waratahs were no longer flowering.