Start from 23 curated places around Cradle Mountain, AU, then choose the recommendations that fit your guests.
Restaurants & cafés
Highland Restaurant
The flagship dining room at Peppers Cradle Mountain Lodge, doing a fine-dining modern Tasmanian menu of cool-climate produce, local seafood and Tasmanian wines in a timber-and-stone room overlooking the bush. It is the closest thing to a destination restaurant inside the park. Best for the one nicer dinner of a stay, with the wallaby and Tasmanian salmon as the cult orders.
Hellyers Restaurant
The dining room at Cradle Mountain Wilderness Village, doing a modern Tasmanian share-plates menu with venison, duck and local seafood matched to Tasmanian wines and whiskies. The room has a stacked-stone fireplace and direct alpine views. Best for a long evening of small plates rather than a fast pub dinner.
Trails & outdoors
Dove Lake Circuit
The 6 km loop around the lake under the spires of Cradle Mountain, mostly on boardwalk through myrtle-beech and pencil pine forest, past the iconic boatshed. Easy underfoot, around two and a half hours, no real climb. Best as the one walk to do if you only have a single fine half-day in the park.
Marions Lookout
The high lookout above Crater Lake with a 360-degree view over Dove Lake, Cradle Mountain and the surrounding plateau, usually done as a loop via Wombat Pool and Lake Lilla. Short but steep, with chain handrails on the final climb. Best for the single most rewarding effort-to-view ratio in the park.
Things to do
Devils @ Cradle
A small conservation sanctuary on Cradle Mountain Road breeding Tasmanian devils and Eastern and Spotted-tail quolls, with after-dark feeding tours where you watch the devils properly tear into a wallaby leg. Tightly run by the keepers themselves. Best as an evening activity after dinner, especially on a rainy night when hiking is off.
Cradle Mountain Wilderness Gallery
A nine-room wilderness photography gallery at the Cradle Mountain Hotel, anchored by a permanent room of Peter Dombrovskis prints and a rotating Aurora Australis exhibition. Free entry, rarely crowded. Best as a quiet hour out of the rain, or a sober counterpoint to a long day on the tracks.
Landmarks & sights
Dove Lake
The glacial tarn at the end of the road, with the jagged Cradle Mountain rising straight out of the water and the much-photographed old boatshed on the shore. It is the single image everyone associates with the park. Best for the first morning view of the mountain reflected in still water before the wind picks up.
Cradle Mountain
The dolerite-spired summit that gives the park its name, on every Tasmanian postcard, looming over Dove Lake at 1,545 metres. You can simply look at it from below or scramble to the top on a long day hike. Best appreciated from the Dove Lake shore, Marions Lookout, or the summit itself in clear weather.