The Lake Highway, or A5, is a main highway and A-road in Tasmania. Although still known as the Lake Highway the official title of the road was changed in 2001 to Highland Lakes Road.
The Lake Highway branches off the Midland Highway at Melton Mowbray in southern Tasmania and continues for 146 kilometres, with Bothwell being the main town of any size on route, it terminates in Deloraine. It is the only major A-road in Australia that is partially unsealed. The highway is one of the least used in Tasmania, except during the summer months when the road is used by Great Lake commuters. The portion of the highway on and near the Great Lake in Tasmania's Central plateau, averages a height of about 1000 metres. During the winter months it is sometimes snowed under.
Two major roads that branch from the Lake Highway are the Marlborough Highway (which connects to the A10 Lyell Highway), and Poatina Rd., (B51), which leaves the Lake Highway north of the Steppes and plunges steeply over the Great Western Tiers to the former hydro-electric construction village of Poatina.
Famous quotes containing the words lake and/or highway:
“What a wilderness walk for a man to take alone! None of your half-mile swamps, none of your mile-wide woods merely, as on the skirts of our towns, without hotels, only a dark mountain or a lake for guide-board and station, over ground much of it impassable in summer!”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“My manner is the footnote to your immoral
Beauty, that leads me with a magic hair
Up the spun highway of a vanishing hill
To Words....”
—Allen Tate (1899–1979)