The morning we woke up in the snow

We arrived at Cradle Mountain Lodge in the dark.

It was late September — honeymoon, with a milestone birthday tucked inside it — and we'd driven up chasing the dark, having spent a couple of hours driving up from the west coast. We saw little of where we were. We found the cabin, lit the fire, poured a glass from the complimentary decanter of port, and went to sleep with no real sense of the landscape we'd just driven into.

Then we woke up, opened the curtains, and the entire world had turned white.

Snow had fallen overnight — properly fallen, blanketing the whole place — and we'd slept clean through it. The wilderness off our balcony, which we'd never actually seen in daylight, arrived all at once, and arrived under snow.

The funny part is that we'd spent the drive up genuinely nervous about exactly this. Someone on the west coast had warned us that if the early snow landed, Strahan could be cut off and we'd be stranded. So we hurried up the mountain to keep the trip moving — and then completely forgot that snow on a mountain is, if anything, rather more likely than snow on the coast. It found us anyway. We just slept through the arrival.

That morning is the reason I'll always tell people to do Cradle Mountain in the shoulder season, in a cabin with a fire, and to pack for absolutely any weather. Late September snow at Cradle Mountain isn't a freak event. It's a real possibility — and when it lands while you're warm inside with a fire, a balcony into the wilderness, and a wombat trundling past on the boardwalk, it's about the best thing that can happen to a weekend.

We barely walked anywhere, if I'm honest. We just stayed close to the cabin and let the place do its thing. Some weekends aren't about conquering the mountain. They're about being somewhere remarkable and not needing to do anything else at all.

I wrote up the full weekend this week — the cabin, the wildlife, the very nervous icy drive back down the mountain in a two-door hatch with no chains, and why I'd bring my own car across on the Spirit every single time.

The Morning We Woke Up in the Snow at Cradle Mountain →

See you next Friday.

— Robert