Date: 20-25/6/2026
Trip leader: Adam H
Party: Liam K, Zhan L, Kieran N
Potentially the two most popular Tasmanian alpine walks, the Overland Track and the Walls of Jerusalem Circuit, sit within 30km of each other so it is quite surprising that linking the two up is somewhat rare. This piqued our interest; surely there was a way and we wanted to do it. Thus, this 6 day walk between the two was born.
Day 1 (WoJ Carpark -> Dixons Kingdom, 9.9km)
Day 1 began with a 7:30AM start from our shared family hotel room in Launceston, leaving us with plenty of time to make the obligatory breakfast stop at a Banjo’s and the less crucial drive out to the Walls of Jerusalem carpark. We entered our walk into the logbook and set off for the 700m of ascent up to Trappers Hut.
Trappers Hut was the first of the nine huts we would visit across over the 6 days.
As we got higher the slippy tree roots of the forest dispersed for much nicer open plains before finally reaching the main Walls area.
On the way up, Zhan at the front of the group suddenly stopped. “What the f***” was heard right before I felt a big furry bonk against my legs. “Was that a wombat?!” came from the back of the group as it ran off the track and back into the scrub. The poor wombat was so startled it had either charged into my legs defensively or in an attempt to get away. I will say their fur feels much softer than it looks.
The Walls area is absolutely stunning. The walls bounding the alpine plains initally feel massive and yet the speed at which you traverse through them makes them feel small.
We made a brief side-trip into the Pool of Bethesda. As would be expected, every feature within the Walls of Jerusalem has a corresponding Biblical name.
Camp was up at 2:30PM and we enjoyed such luxuries as Walls of Jerusalem wasabi cheese and our walk’s allocated readings.
Zhan very kindly carried the latest edition of the Honi Soit up so when the scrub and mud was really bad, we had a reminder that there was something worse we could be enduring. Was this the first time a SUBW party had carried a copy of the Honi onto the Tasmanian high country? Surely not!
Joining us at the Dixons Kingdom platforms was Lucas, a solo-hiker from Germany who was doing the WoJ circuit. He told us he had summitted the nearby peak known as The Temple and attempted a summit of Solomons Throne only to find the last few hundred metres very icy.
We spent a bit of time frolicking around camp, exploring the nearby Vera Vera route and the Dixons Kingdom hut.
Day 2 (Dixons Kingdom -> Junction Lake, 18.9km)
We pondered spending day 2 basecamping from Dixons Kingdom to summit some of the peaks of the walls area, namely Mt Jerusalem and King Davids Peak, however with the warning of ice at the summits and not wanting to faff about at the start of our walk when we had good weather, we decided we would just pack up and keep moving instead. The overnight temp reached -4.4C and it was still well into the negatives in the morning when Lucas came up to our platform .
Despite a 6am wakeup, not quite early enough to be an alpine start but still dark enough for Kieran to coin it as a “subalpine start”, an unprecedented amount of morning faff meant we weren’t on our way until 8am.
Just past Lake Ball, we identified an off-track “shortcut” saddle to where we wanted to go, so we all fanned out and headed for the scrub. This would knock out just over 3km of distance but almost certainly didn’t save us any time. This sidetrack served as a short crucial “taste test” of what was potentially to come on the Never Never and allowed us to track our party’s pace off-track to understand whether the plan for the next day was feasible.
The rest of the day was undeniably beautful but otherwise fairly unremarkable. It consisted of overgrown scrubby sections as the track passed by the various pristine alpine lakes with bouts of wide open plains in between.
Between all the mud and the scrub of the Junction Lake track, progress along the 19km was frustratingly slow and we spent every last hour of daylight pushing through it.
The sun had just set on us when we had finally made it to a lovely campsite just off Junction Lake.
Day 3 (Junction Lake -> Kia Ora Hut via Never Never, 12.3km)
Day 3 was the day of the Never Never. I think we were all a bit nervous of what we would be up against. The Never Never is a valley that separates the Cathedral Plateau and the Traveller Range and would be our way into the Cradle Mountain Lake St Clair National Park and onto the Overland Track. There were two unknowns: just how scrubby would it be and would the mandatory Mersey River crossing even be feasible. I had scouted a few trip reports on the Never Never but all were at least a few years old, there was no telling if the pictured fallen trees to cross had been washed away or what the state of the “footpad” would be.
The idea of potentially bashing in through 6km of thick scrub, only to not find a safe spot to cross the river and have to hoof it back through, the day after the winter solstice, made all of us a little nervous. We were expecting the worst. There was a route marked on OSM, but none on the official Tasmap nor any evidence of people going through on the Strava heatmap.
To give ourselves the best chance of success, we hit the track just before first light at 7am and made our way to where Junction Lake becomes the Mersey River. We spent a bit of time trying to find a footpad corresponding to the route marked on OSM but to no avail. Eventually we came across a bit of discloured flagging tape that was probably older than us and accompanied a footpad indistinguishable from the dozens of wombat tracks around. At this point we gave up on trying to find the footpad and just descended straight into the Never Never valley.
Aside from picking the best path through the various open forest, river banks, plains and scrubby sections we encountered, navigation was as easy as can be; just follow the river. (It should be noted that the Never Never route should only be attempted by experienced walkers with experience navigating off-track). Where we saw open plains close enough to the river, we headed for them to speed up progress. We were treated to faint footpad in some of the scrubbier sections as well which was very welcome.
Clark Falls and McCoy Falls both sit in this rarely visited section of the Mersey and they were absolutely pumping. By this point I was confident that the scrub wasn’t going to suddenly become impenetrable and we had made good progress. We could all relax a bit, though the question of crossing still remained.
Eventually we reached a low point of the river that looked crossable. The river was running a bit faster than walking pace, but it had shallowed out quite a bit so a crossing looked very much doable. We probably could’ve looked further for fallen trees or the like to stay dry, but we didn’t want to pass up on this very suitable crossing and faff about looking around.
As someone in our party was concerned about crossing themselves given the pace of the river, we formed a mutual support chain to cross. We passed around the trekking poles and discussed our game plan, a no-go if the river ended up being higher than waist height, and linked arms.
It turned out to be not much deeper than knee height and really not that forceful, our preparation had turned out to be a bit of a joke but it was still a good opportunity to refresh these skills. Much to Kieran’s dismay, we stopped in the middle of the near freezing alpine river for a good selfie.
Another kilometre or so of scrub and forest to push through and we were at the top of Hartnett falls, one of the sidetrips of the Overland Track. How did we know? We were greeted by no less than 5 direction indicators and 3 “don’t fall off the edge” signs.
The Never Never had taken us just under 4hrs and been significantly easier than we’d expected. With plenty of daylight left, we headed up the actual Overland and enjoyed a long lunch break in Du Cane Hut.
The lunch break was in fact so long that Kieran and I got tired of waiting and we split into two groups. We smashed out the remaining distance to Kia Ora Hut atop the boardwalk in 40 minutes.
“That’s not a hut, that’s a house!” Kieran exclaimed as we approached it.
Liam and Zhan arrived 30 minutes later and we bagged a bunkroom. After we had set up all of our stuff, another hut goer came into our room to explain that she had a group of 7 and the smaller room some of them had already set up in did not have 7 bunks. We happily swapped rooms, though we definitely counted more than 7 bunks in the smaller room. We had been asked to pack up all of our stuff and set it back up again not because the smaller room could not accomodate them, but because they just wanted more space to spread out (and probably too the nicer view from the larger room).
There was a real sense of entitlement, that is often not found in the bush, amongst the rest of the hut goers that night. It wasn’t a particularly cold night, and yet there was a real push to get the heater going. The gas that powers these heaters is a precious resource that obviously has to be helicoptered in at great expense to Tas parks at a time when the Overland is not generating any booking revenue. The signs thus ask that the heater not be on unless necessary and requests that it not be on when the temp inside is above 10 degrees.
And yet, we watched them fiddle with the heater (various people visited the gas tanks outside our bunkroom’s window, one shaking a tank with all his body weight to achieve… something?) trying to get it going. Once it was on, it was blasting all night crowded with smelly wet socks and people who “needed” to stand right in front of the heater to warm their legs. The common room became so hot that we had to remove layers as we entered. Did everyone not have the clothing to stay warm without the help of the heater??? If so, what were they doing here in winter???
Day 4 (Kia Ora Hut -> New Pelion Hut, 8.6km)
Day 4 we were walking an easy section of the Overland so we had a very slow morning, not leaving the hut until 11am.
It was our first day of bad weather, but I was still keen to see how far we could get on a Mt Ossa summit.
At Pelion Gap, the rain was bad enough that nobody could be convinced to join me on an attempt at summitting Ossa. We thus continued on to New Pelion. I went ahead at this point, Kieran just trailing behind as we smashed out some 10 minute kilometres to reach the hut at ~1pm.
We were all at the hut eating lunch when a group from Kia Ora that we had overtaken on the track reached the hut. They entered and like a moth to a flame, their packs still on their back, immediately headed to the heater to turn it on. The indoor temperature was very comfortable and decidedly above the 10 degree cutoff that should be observed. More groups made their way in and the heater became progressively more crowded with wet smelly gear.
The written request to “please be conservative [about leaving the heater on]” clearly did not apply to these people.
Day 5 (New Pelion Hut -> Pine Hut Plain, 15.0km)
Day 5 was another slow start, we weren’t walking until 10am. The first bit of the walk, being shared with the Arm River Track, was very distinct and had sections of boardwalk. By the time we turned off onto the Lees Paddock track past Lake Ayr, the pad became much easier to lose.
From this section on, lots of track markers meant navigation was just a matter of spotting the next marker.
We stopped for lunch at Lees Paddock, a rare parcel of private land completely encircled by the national park. We had sought and been granted permission to camp here by the landowners for the following night, so whilst I’m sure there wouldn’t be an issue with shifting forward a day, we still wanted to respect the consent system and continued on.
On Lees Paddock is Lewis Lees Hut, a historic hut with a lot of cool relics inside including an old-school MSR fuel bottle and a copy of Lord of the Flies that has seen some stuff.
At around 4pm we reached our crown land campsite just by the Mersey River in front of the privately owned Pine Hut Plain.
This is where the group’s first and only leech bite of the trip was discovered in the form of a new blood stain in my rain pants. The cold weather had really done a good job keeping them at bay, or maybe we’re just not that tasty, as other trip reports from the area report endless amounts of sanguivores.
We were still faced with the prospect of a 11km roadbash to our car at the Walls of Jerusalem carpark the following morning, so shortly after pitching my tent I convinced Liam to join me on completing this chore that evening instead. This brought our walking distance for the day up to 26km, but we made excellent time having left the packs behind.
This nighttime car retrieval mission consisted of about 90 minutes of walking and 30 minutes of driving back at a speed suitable for the field of wildlife that is a Tasmanian road after dark.
Day 6 (Pine Hut Plain -> Mersey Forest Rd, 0.95km)
Day 6 we had the immense task of ascending over 50 metres of elevation and traversing over 950 metres of constructed track including an extremely difficult crossing of the Mersey, aided only by some kind of silver thing that must’ve fallen across the river. Only then would we be back at the car Liam and I left there the previous night.
We ended up finishing in 6 days as opposed to the scheduled 7 days as we were planning for snow cover and poor weather. This was by far the best weather I have experienced in any Tasmanian walk, with only one day of rain and relatively blue skies for the other 5. The Honi Soit did not fare as well as us, being martyrised in an attempt to dry Zhan’s shoes. At least it did not end up being the total waste of paper it was destined to be.
Until next time…
