A bus a trip with Evans coaches from Hobart down to Ida Bay. A short stop at Dover for pie and coffee the last for 14 days . Fortunately Lil bought extra pies for dinner. The walk started from the registration area in the car park . After adding fuel and water my pack weighed 30 kg , much more than I intended , and it was poorly adjusted as I found out after a week! The walk goes along the old rail to the abandoned limestone quarry . Here we made a short side trip to mystery cave .After that the climb started through thick bush . The steep parts had me crawling rather than walking due to my heavy pack ! I’d have to say this was the hardest 5km of my life – I thought ironman was hard. Eventually we were up on Moonlight ridge and at the first campsite( it looked pretty cramped ) met a couple coming back the other way and cringed at their description of snow and knee deep mud ! Not having time to get to our intended campsite a small open area on the ridge was our campsite for the night .  There was a howling gale blowing ,intermittent snow ,hail and rain ( yes that’s snow on the peaks in the pics)  temperature about 0 degrees . We ate our cold pies in our tent and were not coming out to cook!Below is a profile , some pics and a google map of our track via my gps.