Recently, fellow RTBG Food Garden volunteer N was delighted that walking on tracks on Mt Wellington above Hobart was permissible again, as isolation restrictions have been relaxed.

With relief and excitement he set out on a combination cycle and walking trek and here is his record.

‘We were walking to Wellington Falls after cycling along the pipeline track from Neika (opposite Morphett’s road).’ Refer here for more information. 

‘It was just over 6.5kms to the start of the walk and there’s a couple of bike racks there. It was crazy busy on the mountain all the way from South Hobart to Neika – cars everywhere, people walking, cycling and running so that maintaining social distancing was a challenge. The walk itself is only just over 2kms but reasonably steep – it took us 30 minutes (sign said 40 minutes one way). It was quite cool most of the way as we were in shade until the Falls.

The photos below look towards Wellington Falls from the Lookout

Below, the photo shows an area before the Falls. ‘Not sure if there is an area you can observe the falls from the bottom but there didn’t seem to be a path anywhere handy and it was quite steep’.

We then started up the other side of the Falls walking towards Mount Montagu. About the next photo N says ‘this is me looking lost trying to use GPS watch to see how far off the track we were on our way to Mount Montagu’.

‘The next photo is that of the river – North West Bay River(?) after we’d crossed it and had started to climb looking for the track to Mount Montagu.’

N concluded his email information with ‘My friend had done this walk some many years ago so we thought we’d see what it was like. The going was fairly hard with the track not easy to follow, some steep rock hopping and it was fairly overgrown so after an hour of bush bashing we realised that it was perhaps a trip for another day when we might take in Cathedral Rock etc. All up we walked just over 6kms for 2.5 hours so effectively the 2kms of bush bashing took us 1.5 hours which speaks to the challenging nature of the terrain and the difficulty of just finding the track in places. Cycling back was reasonably quick as all downhill – the greatest difficulty was in dodging the hordes of people walking on the pipeline track.’

Thanks N. Your story and the glorious photos inspire me to get out there again. Please keep your walking stories coming!