The walk is usually done over five or six days, almost always from north to south, a direction now fixed by policy rather than preference. The reason is the weather: Cradle Mountain catches nearly twice the rainfall of Lake St Clair, so starting in the north gets the wettest, most exposed ground behind you early. A chain of public huts maintained by Tasmania Parks and Wildlife lets walkers sleep indoors each night, though carrying a tent is mandatory in case the huts are full or something goes wrong. The track itself is mostly well marked, with long stretches of duckboard, split-log boardwalk wired together over the boggiest ground. Where the boards run out, the famous Tasmanian mud takes over, deep and dark and unavoidable.

The official distance undersells the experience, because the best of the Overland Track lies just off it. Walkers willing to drop their packs and climb can scale Cradle Mountain itself, or push up Mount Ossa, at 1,617 metres the highest point in Tasmania, for a summit view across a sea of dolerite ranges. Other detours lead to Barn Bluff, the waterfalls of the Du Cane Range, and a cluster of glacial tarns called The Labyrinth, reached through Pine Valley. Many walkers extend the journey a further day by following the shore of Lake St Clair instead of taking the ferry, stretching the full route to 82 kilometres. The track is challenging but not technical: the real test is endurance, preparation, and a willingness to be wet.

Long before the track was cut, this was a route between peoples. The Overland corridor spans the boundary between the Big River and Northern Tasmanian Aboriginal nations, and stone tools and old campsites between Pelion Plains and Lake St Clair show it was used for thousands of years. The broad buttongrass plains the track crosses may themselves be a human legacy, shaped over millennia by Aboriginal fire-stick burning. That deep presence was violently broken: Tasmania's Aboriginal people were dispossessed and killed after European settlement, and the last free Aboriginal Tasmanians in this country were recorded near Barn Bluff in 1836. Walkers today move through a landscape that was lived in, and grieved over, long before it became a wilderness to visit.

This is not a walk to underestimate. The weather is unstable in every season: above 35 degrees in summer, below freezing in winter, snow possible on the Cradle Plateau and around Mount Ossa at any time of year, and rain that can turn torrential without notice. In 2014 an international student walking the track died of hypothermia between Kitchen Hut and Waterfall Valley, caught out by a sudden storm without adequate clothing. His death led to tougher preparedness guidelines and multilingual warnings at the trailheads, a sober reminder that this beauty has teeth. For those who come ready, the rewards are immense. There is even a race: the Cradle Mountain Run, held annually since 1980, whose course record of seven hours and twenty-five minutes covers in a morning what most walkers savour over a week.