Tasmania Wild Rivers National Park – watch the video of our very snowy road trip!
A road trip through a Tasmanian snowy wonder-land…
In September we went for a road trip around Tasmania – and got caught in a major cold-snap blizzard!
We had been staying in the beautiful port town of Strahan after touring the Gordon River, and were headed next for Hobart. We were driving along the Lyell Highway, climbing up out of Queenstown when it started to snow, and it continued as we made our way through the mountains of the World Heritage Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park. This is a beautiful drive at any time, but it is also one of the slower major routes in Tasmania and requires careful driving. Our whole journey that day took an epic 8 hours (with breaks) for 300kms – usually this trip takes around 5 hours.
This trip was the girl’s first experience of real snow, and they had an absolute ball, asking me to stop so they could leap out to “feel” the snow. Brooke was so excited that she forgot to put her shoes on at first, and went bare-foot for her very first snowball fight!
Going to the Tasmania West Coast? Get a 4WD hire car!
We saw no other vehicles for hours that day, and I had never driven through snow before. Thankfully we had been upgraded by Budget hire car in Hobart. We had originally booked a medium car, and we were upgraded to a 4WD hire car for free – and this was a very lucky thing too, in hindsight! In our big 4WD, we were warm, safe and secure driving through some pretty heavy blizzard conditions. If you’re travelling in Tasmania in the winter/spring months on the West Coast, I would highly recommend that you consider a 4WD. I suspect this was also the reason we saw next to no other vehicles on the road that day – the smaller hire cars just couldn’t cope with that much snow over the road – at times we could barely see the road!
Even though conditions were challenging, the incredible beauty we witnessed made it so worthwhile. We later learned at the first roadhouse we came to after descending from the mountains, that even the logging trucks had halted going back up into the mountains that day!
But really, only video and photos can tell the story, so here is a vlog record of what we saw – and it was just amazing!
To see the great hotels and locations we stayed in during our Tasmania circumnavigation road trip, read our Top 5 Amazing Tasmania Hotels blog here
Watch the video of our Strahan to Hobart national park blizzard trip
Play the video to below to watch our blizzard road trip…
Have you ever been to the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers National Park? Tell us in the comments below!
