Trails & Tales

Rocky Cape was the first proper hike since the canyon floor at Leven, a ten-kilometre loop along the north-western coast that AllTrails had rated as moderate and the flies had rated as theirs. They were bad from the start. Not the lazy, circling kind but the kind that aim for the face, and within the first kilometre Anth inhaled one mid-sentence and spent the next few minutes coughing it out while Sal dug through her pack for the fly net. We had one between us. Sal wore it. Anth walked ahead with his mouth closed and his dignity adjusting.

The track followed the coast above Bass Strait, the water rough and dark below the cliffs. Sea eagles rode the updrafts along the headland, wide-winged and unhurried, circling in a way that made walking feel like the slow option. Tinkers Lookout opened up a view east toward Stanley and the flat-topped shape of the Nut, distinctive even at a distance, and Cathedral Rock stood on the exposed clifftop like something the wind had been working on for longer than it cared to remember.

The tiger snake appeared without warning. A rustle in the scrub beside the track, a flash of brown, and then it was across the path and gone, fast enough to make the heart rate meaningless for a second or two. Sal stepped back and gestured Anth forward with the kind of courtesy that is really just self-preservation in good manners. He led for the rest of the loop. Neither of them pretended it was for any other reason.

Cathedral Hill, which they had bypassed on the way out, caught them on the return with a view that ran the length of the coastline in both directions. They stood there long enough for the sweat to cool and the flies to find them again, taking in a stretch of coast that felt, from this height, wilder than anything they had seen from the road. It was the kind of view that makes the walking worthwhile and makes you wonder why you nearly skipped it.

The afternoon softened. We visited the lighthouse, read the panels about the sailors it had guided, and drove the short distance into Stanley for fish and chips on a bench in town. Simple food in a simple place, the kind of meal that becomes part of a day rather than the point of it. Sal went to bed early that evening, tired from the walk, and Anth went out alone with his phone and a head torch to hunt geocaches in the dark. He found three. The quiet of a small Tasmanian town at night, with nobody else on the streets and the GPS leading him through back lanes and parks, was its own kind of walk.

The next morning we climbed the Nut. The chairlift ran to the summit, but we took the walking track instead, steep and direct, the sort of climb that asks you to earn the view rather than buy it. The top was a flat circuit with the town spread out below on one side and Bass Strait stretching away on the other, and the wind up there was strong enough to make standing still feel like an activity. It was a good summit. But Rocky Cape, from the day before, still sat higher in both of us. Some places set the mark early, and the Nut, for all its shape and drama, was following rather than leading.

We drove twenty minutes to the next camp, already talking about what came next.Read more