Mount Wellington

Mount Wellington (officially kunanyi / Mount Wellington ()) is a mountain in the southeast of Tasmania, Australia. It is the summit of the Wellington Range and is within Wellington Park reserve.

Hobart, Tasmania's capital city, is located at the foot of the mountain. The mountain rises to 1,271 metres (4,170 ft) above sea level and is frequently covered by snow, sometimes even in summer, and the lower slopes are thickly forested, but crisscrossed by many walking tracks and a few fire trails. There is also a sealed narrow road to the summit, about 22 kilometres (14 mi) from Hobart central business district. An enclosed lookout near the summit has views of the city below and to the east, the Derwent estuary, and also glimpses of the World Heritage Area nearly 100 kilometres (62 mi) west. From Hobart, the most distinctive feature of Mount Wellington is the cliff of dolerite columns known as the Organ Pipes.

The low-lying areas and foothills of Mount Wellington were formed by slow geological upsurge when the whole Hobart area was a low-lying cold shallow seabed. The upper reaches of the mountain were formed more violently, as a Sill with a tabular mass of igneous rock that has been intruded laterally between layers of older rock pushing upwards by upsurges of molten rock as the Australian continental shelf tore away from Antarctica, and separated from Gondwana over 40 million years ago. A small volcanic vent was active about 300m south of the Pinnacle during Tertiary times, between 50 and 10 million years ago.

The aboriginal nations people of the area referred to Mount Wellington as kunanyi (or ungyhaletta), poorawetter (or pooranetere, also pooranetteri).The indigenous people of Tasmania referred to it as kunanyi. The Palawa, the surviving descendants of the original indigenous Tasmanians, tend to prefer the latter name. In 2013, the Tasmanian government announced a dual naming policy and "kunanyi / Mount Wellington" was named as one of the inaugural dual named geographic features.

The first recorded European in the area Abel Tasman probably did not see the mountain in 1642, as his ship was quite a distance out to sea as he sailed up the South East coast of the island – coming closer in near present-day North and Marion Bays.No other Europeans visited Tasmania until the late eighteenth century, when several visited southern Tasmania (then referred to as Van Diemens Land) including Frenchman Marion du Fresne (1772), Englishmen Tobias Furneaux (1773), James Cook (1777) and William Bligh (1788 and 1792), and Frenchman Bruni d'Entrecasteaux (1792–93). In 1793 Commodore John Hayes arrived at the Derwent River, naming the mountain Skiddaw, after the mountain in the Lake District, although this name never gained popularity.In 1798 Matthew Flinders and George Bass circumnavigated the island. Whilst they were resting in the area Flinders named the river the Derwent River (the name John Hayes had given only to the upper part of the river), Flinders referred to the mountain as 'Table Mountain' (the name given to it by Bond and Bligh – young Matthew Flinders was with them in 1791) for its similarity in appearance to Table Mountain in South Africa. Bruni d'Entrecasteaux's men were the first European to sail up the river and chart it. Later Nicholas Baudin led another French expedition in 1802, and whilst sheltering in the Derwent River (which they referred to as 'River du Nord' – the name d'Entrecasteaux had given to it) Baudin also referred to the mountain as 'Montagne du Plateau' (also named by d'Entrecasteaux). However, the British first settled in the Hobart area in 1804, resulting in Flinders' name of 'Table Mountain' becoming more popular. Table Mountain remained its common name until in 1832 it was decided to rename the mountain in honour of the Duke of Wellington who, with Gebhard Leberecht von Blücher finally defeated Napoleon at the Battle of Waterloo in present-day Belgium on 18 June 1815.

In February 1836, Charles Darwin visited Hobart Town and climbed Mount Wellington. In his book The Voyage of the Beagle, Darwin described the mountain thus:

"... In many parts the Eucalypti grew to a great size, and composed a noble forest. In some of the dampest ravines, tree-ferns flourished in an extraordinary manner; I saw one which must have been at least twenty feet high to the base of the fronds, and was in girth exactly six feet. The fronds forming the most elegant parasols, produced a gloomy shade, like that of the first hour of the night. The summit of the mountain is broad and flat, and is composed of huge angular masses of naked greenstone. Its elevation is 3,100 feet [940 m] above the level of the sea. The day was splendidly clear, and we enjoyed a most extensive view; to the north, the country appeared a mass of wooded mountains, of about the same height with that on which we were standing, and with an equally tame outline: to the south the broken land and water, forming many intricate bays, was mapped with clearness before us. ..." The first weather station was set up on Mount Wellington in 1895 by Clement Lindley Wragge. Mount Wellington has played host to some notorious characters over time, especially the bushranger 'Rocky' Whelan, who murdered several travelers in the middle of the 19th century. The cave where he lived is known appropriately as 'Rocky Whelan's Cave', and is an easy walk from the Springs.

The summit of the mountain has a tundra climate (Koppen ET; Trewartha Fi) according to the standard Köppen–Geiger and Trewartha climate classification systems, as a maritime polar climate according to the Australian Bureau of Meteorology classification system. Using Otto Nordenskjöld's alternative polar isotherm, it could be considered to have a subpolar oceanic climate (Köppen Cfc) or a maritime sub(ant)arctic climate (Trewartha Eo), though extreme winds—having been recorded at sustained speeds of over 157 kilometres per hour (98 mph), with rare gusts of up to 200 kilometres per hour (120 mph)—prevent tree cover. Its record low temperature is -9.1 °C (15.6 °F) recorded on 3 September 1993, extreme for Australia and Tasmania though not especially so, lying outside the top 10 readings and top 7 locations for the state with its exposed, maritime aspect; its average yearly record low of around -6.4 °C (20.5 °F) places it within USDA hardiness zone 9a and Australian National Botanic Gardens hardiness zone 2. It is one of a handful of Australian locations to have never recorded a temperature above 30 °C (86 °F), its highest temperature ever being 29.8 °C (85.6 °F) most recently recorded on 31 January 2020, automatically putting it within American Horticultural Society heat zone 1; the average yearly record high is around 26.4 °C (79.5 °F).The mountain significantly influences Hobart's weather, and intending visitors to the summit are advised to dress warmly against the often icy winds. In the winter it frequently snows and the mountain is often snowcapped. Lighter snowfalls in spring, summer and autumn are also common. A day on the summit can consist of clear sunny skies, then rain, snow, icy winds and clear again. Only in the months of January and February is it expected that fewer than 3 days will record a frost, and its summit is one of the only locations in Australia to routinely experience sub-freezing daily maxima, with more than 1 in 10 days in both July and August expected to be ice days, and experiencing the coldest daily highs in Tasmanian history at -5.0 °C (23.0 °F) on 5 September 1995 and 11 August 2005.

208 Network. (1994) Mt. Wellington – Mountain Park resource management plan and master plan for the Corporation of the City of Hobart : final draft for public comment : Hobart : 208 Network. "The 208 Network is John Hepper, Jerry de Gryse, with assistance from Chris Sharples, Fred and Diana Duncan, Robert Taylor, Hilary du Cros, Lindy Scripps, Greg Hodge". Curtis, Winifred M. (Winifred Mary) (n.d.) Forests and flowers of Mount Wellington, Tasmania illustrated by D. Colbron Pearse. [Hobart]: Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery. de Quincey, Elizabeth and Cannon, John (2005) The Companion to Tasmanian History p. 245 – entry "Mount Wellington" Hosier, Phoebe (26 April 2020). "'Something's happened up there': Why Aboriginal Tasmanians shun Hobart's mountain top". ABC News. Barnes, Angus (1992), 'Mount Wellington and the sense of place', Honours thesis, University of Tasmania. https://eprints.utas.edu.au/31711/