It’s 3pm on a Friday afternoon, Erin and i are discussing what to do for the weekend. Should we hike Kozzy (Australia’s slang name for our highest mountain)? Well it’s only 5 hours away and we only need to get a tent and hiking bags to get ready… overnight hike of the snowy mountains here we come!
Quick Stuff
Where – Australia’s snowy mountains, 5 hours from Sydney, 5 hours from Melbourne, 1 hour from Canberra
When – Summer/Autumn. Winter and spring is a very different experience.
Cost – FREE!!!! providing you have the gear and don’t do it the way we did it.
Yes, Australia has snow. It’s kind of hard to imagine with roughly 60% of our country made up by arid deserts but we definitely get snow. So much snow in fact that we have a whole region named after the icey substance, that region is the Snowy Mountains. For 4 months of the year this area actually has that substance there and one can find the region populated by expensive car’s, overpriced beers, sub par food and extremely overpriced lift tickets. Sidenote: this year Thredbo increased its price by 20% to an astonishing $170 per day, it’s no surprie why our local skiers and snowboarders would rather travel abroad to enjoy their sport.
However, the other 8 months of the year represent a much quieter landscape, although one akin to a very outdoorsy life of hiking, bird watching and mountain bike riding. This area is fantastic for some outdoor time and at very last minute notice we’ve decided to cover off an overnight hike in the snowy mountains. The plan is quite simple; in the car by 4am, arrive at charlotte’s pass carpark by 10, hike a casual 5 k’s to blue lake and camp the night. How easy!… gosh were we wrong.
Preparation wasn’t too bad, I have most of the kit for myself, we were really just sourcing gear for Erin. A quick stop to K-mart and we had a hiking pack for $35 and a tent for $14. A long shot from my pack for $600 and what I’d usually use as a back country tent for $400. Now these item’s were cheap and did work for us but could’ve also been a major problem which I’ll cover later.
A bit of a hurdle
The drive was moderately uneventful asides from napping coffee until we hit Jindabyne and we realised the snowy classic, a 170km endurance race, was on and all the roads leading to charlotte’s pass were shut down. Meaning, the spot we were going to park our car for the night was now a no-go. After initial confusion and panic of what to do we decided it’s best to head straight for Thredbo and leave from there. This had a few downsides to it, firstly the added cost of lift tickets at $100 each (ouch!), our 5km hike in was now looking more like 10+ and to top it off we would be racing the sun to have camp setup by daylight.
A quick trip up the chairlift, a photo at the top and we were off on the Mount Kosciuszko trail, a 6km trail leading to the summit of Australia’s highest mountain. About halfway along the trail there is a lookout platform showing off the mountain, although it would be incredibly easy for someone to mistake this ‘mountain’ as a hill given Australia’s flat landscape. From here following the Main Range trail to Blue Lake would take a long 16km journey, so myself having some experience in the army navigating terrain, punched a bearing for our destination and went off track in a direct beeline for our end spot. The terrain is extremely open and very hard to get lost in so in this circumstance it’s very much safe to do so.
To me this felt like actually starting our journey, away from crowds, rock hopping over stream and working our way on our self guided track, we were exploring the high country and making our own adventure. The high spirits continued for at least another 5 k’s until i realised that we were falling behind time and risked setting up camp in the dark, not super terrible but also not ideal. We stepped up the pace as the terrain turned more ‘variable’. Standing on a high rocky feature I spied our path, down a deceptively easy looking valley immediately in front of us and up the other side, couldn’t be more than a kilometre across and 100 metres in elevation.
What i hadn’t anticipated was the forest of metre high shrubs directly in front of us and within 50 metre’s knew a mistake had been made. This hillside maze (below) of ankle trappers and leg scratchers took at least 45 minutes to get down. I fell over twice while Erin fell over at least 50 times, the both of us laughing hysterically every time it happened. Navigating the maze and clambering up the other side, the sun was setting on our shoulder but we were very close to our end point. Two final kilometres directly uphill and we arrived at our detonation, blue lake, with half an hour of light to spare.
One Cold Night
In a hurry to enjoy the alpine sunset we set up the tent, cracked out a cheeseboard and opened the bottle of wine I’d been carrying all day. A stunning end to a long day! One slight problem…we realise it was getting cold, like really cold. The day had been about 16-17 degree’s and we’d brought warm clothes for the night but we didn’t anticipate the 1-2 degree’s that it was. Donning every bit of clothing we had and wrapping ourselves i our sleeping bags to stay warm we were ok but only just.
Our K-mart tent did the job but it resembled more of a beach sunshade than an alpine shelter, the walls were more fly screen then heat insulator and we had no rain protection. We were lucky there was not a drop of water in the sky as this could’ve been a very different story about the results of alpine hypothermia. Long story short, be prepared!
A meal of Jetboil Migoreng noodles later, lying on our backs with out heads poking out the beach tent door, we had the most impressive display of stars and the Milky Way I’ve ever seen in my life. Unfortunately i didn’t have my main camera as it was a wonderland for astrophotography.
Australia’s Highest ‘Mountain’
Dawn broke with the sun over Blue lake and the two of us sipping hot delicious morning coffee. Blue lake is one of Australia’s highest and very few glacial lakes, in the winter it freezes over and offers ice climbing on the surrounding cliffs, in the summer it’s an extremely frigid 5 degree’s with perfect blue water. After quick trip down to the lake waterline we packed up camp and set off along the main range track.
Climbing an elevation of a few hundred metres we reached the top of the range on Mount Sentinel. The views on the range are breath-taking, providing a 360 degree panorama of the local region from deep forested valleys, rocky ravines to open alpine tundra.
We continued on the track for another 6-7 kilometres, stopping at various lookouts before joining back onto the Kosciusko summit track. The immediate influx of people on the track was extremely noticeable and quite jarring considering we’d been in solitude for the past 24 hours. Taking the short and reasonably steep final steps up to the summit we stopped for lunch, a drink break and the mandatory ‘TOP OF AUSTRALIA’ picture before setting back off.
We covered the remaining 5-6 k’s of the track’s steel grate with relative ease, although we were starting to get quite weary and sluggish, to finish our trip in the same spot we started from and enjoy our chairlift ride back down.
Settling into one of Thredbo’s pub’s for a quick beer before the long drive home we reminisced on the action packed weekend. Ticking off an overnight hike of the snowy mountains; We’d covered 28 k’s by foot, 1000k’s by car and jammed a lot of laugh’s into a spontaneous 48 hours. A trip i would recommend to anyone feeling adventurous!
