South Wellington Plateau
Friday 13 March 2015
Drizzle and mist caused abandonment of this walk recently, but today was ideal with mostly sunny and calm conditions.
The route was up the Ice house track and a short distance along the track to smiths Monument we turned off and ascended a rise of mixed scrub and rock to reach Hutchisons Fireplace. This rock structure has been sanding in this spot for over 100 years and was built by surveyor H. R. Hutchison. He was commissioned by Hobart City to survey watersheds of the streams west and south of Collins Bonnet and the survey was completed in May 1903. The area was also known as Camp Rock and described as being at Wellington Gap.
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The central part of the plateau is open and with several small tarns and pools, whereas the edges and the drier rockier areas have low snow gum coverage. Both these quite varied parts are interesting in such nice weather were a pleasure to walk through. Two rocky prominences at the far end of the plateau were visited and then a descent made to the lower shelf. Getting down proved harder to navigate than it is when picking a route up when walking in in the reverse direction and resulted in a couple of quite short boulder fields having to be crossed. With the help of a GPS waypoint the track back to the Ice House was located but was diverted from to use the Smiths Monument track in order to shorten the journey.
The walk including breaks took 6 hours and was approximately 9.6k
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