Russell Falls came first. Long before the national park existed, the colony recognised that this three-tiered cascade was worth protecting, and in 1885 the land around it was set aside as Tasmania's first nature reserve. It remains the park's most beloved sight, a wide, fern-fringed staircase of water reached by an easy walk from the visitor centre. But it is not alone. A single grade-three circuit of about seven and a half kilometres links Russell Falls with Horseshoe Falls and Lady Barron Falls, threading the Tall Trees along the way, though the route asks for some effort, climbing more than four hundred steps and turning slick after rain. The quieter two falls reward anyone willing to walk past the crowds at the first.

The Tall Trees Walk leads into a forest that humbles. Here grow swamp gums, Eucalyptus regnans, known on the mainland as mountain ash and recognised as the tallest flowering plants in the world; the species' record-holders push toward a hundred metres. Walking beneath them, neck craned, you feel the scale in your body before your mind catches up: straight pale trunks vanishing into a green ceiling, the light filtering down soft and underwater. The short loop sits just a brief drive from the park entrance and forms part of the larger Three Falls Circuit, making these giants accessible to almost anyone who can manage a gentle, well-made path.

Drive the Lake Dobson Road to the top and the world transforms. It is the park's only through road, climbing from the visitor centre to the plateau, and beyond it you travel on foot or not at all. During the Pleistocene, snowfields blanketed the Mount Field plateau and fed glaciers that ground down into the surrounding valleys. One glacier some twelve kilometres long gouged out the broad valley and the steep cirque walls above Lake Seal; others scooped the basins now holding Twisted Tarn, Twilight Tarn, and the chain of pools across the tarn shelf. The result is a high country of mirror-still lakes, alpine heath, and pandani, the strange grass-tree that thrives along the easy loop around Lake Dobson. In winter the plateau draws skiers and demands snow chains on the road; the rest of the year it offers a stark, beautiful contrast to the rainforest far below. Locals call Mount Field 'the park for all seasons,' and the cold up top can rival anything in Europe or Canada, so the gateway town of New Norfolk, known for its oysters, makes a fitting last stop before the climb.

Mount Field shelters a roll call of Tasmanian wildlife. Wombats and pademelons graze the clearings, platypuses ripple the lakes, and echidnas shuffle through the undergrowth; the Tasmanian devil lives here too, though it is rarely seen. The park carries a more haunting connection as well. The thylacine, the striped Tasmanian tiger, once moved through these forests, and the last known wild individual was captured nearby in the Florentine region in 1933, only three years before the species was lost forever. Globally, the wider wilderness around Mount Field is exceptional, one of only a handful of World Heritage areas anywhere to satisfy seven of the ten criteria UNESCO uses, recognising both its natural splendour and its cultural depth.