A summer trip to the Walls of Jerusalem National Park with some friends. We’d planned to camp for three nights in the park (Wild Dog Creek, Dixon’s Kingdom, and Lake Ball), but with the weather forecast turning sour with strong wind and flood warnings we ended up cutting the trip short by a day and skipping the lake to head home on day 3.

Day 1 opened with grey but dry weather. We started with a steep slog from Lake Rowallan up to the plateau, followed by a more gentle walk alongside tarns and small lakes to eventually reach Wild Dog campsite nestled at the foot of Herod’s Gate.

Day 2 was our only clear weather of the trip, which we decided to make the most of by doing three summits. Starting from Wild Dog Creek, we walked up into the alpine valley sheltered by the Walls: tarns and pools, classically Tassie dolerite mountains, all dotted with beautiful stands of pencil pine. From Damascus Gate (the second major pass of the walk) a short but sharp scramble up to Solomon’s Throne rewarded us with stunning views over the ranges to the southwest and Cradle Mt/Barn Bluff to the northwest. After another short trip up The Temple it was down to the valley to make camp in Dixon’s Kingdom, sheltered from the wind by a big stand of pines. Finally, we used the last of the long daylight hours to climb Mt Jerusalem and gain a beautiful viewpoint back into the park, framed above by the peaks of Cradle Mt.

With the weather forecast taking a sharp turn for the worst, we decided to make Day 3 our last and walk back out via dropping down from the mountains to the less-used junction track. The day started with mist and light rain leaving Dixon’s Kingdom as we descended town toward lakes Ball and Adelade. As we reached the lakes, the vegetation gradually changed from the alpine meadows of the Walls to dense myrtle and fagus (alongside the pines) and finally opened up into a long, wide, glaciated valley. The track here was clearly less maintained than the mountain tracks we’d been on until this point but was still clear and easy to follow, and with good weather preceding our trip the muddly sections were all dry and hard.