Iceaxes, crampons and an anticlimactic peak

For the third weekend in a row, I packed my tent and stove, gathered all the warm clothes I could carry and made the three hour drive down to the Snowy Mountains. As on the previous trip, the first stop was in Jyndabyne to collect the mysterious Peter Luk. Kiwi-born, he came over to Australia for a job with Snowy Hydro... then decided to stay after he saw the mountains, and is now working out of Jindabyne over the Winter, Cooma over the Summer.We made our way to Thredbo where, surrounded by alpine skiers in their trendy clothes, we made an odd picture kitted out with crampons, climbing helmets and ice-axes. Most of us were wearing snowshoes, so we were to be those annoying touristy types who walk onto the chairlift and take up two seats each because of their oversized packs. Our packs were even worse than those, because they were multi-day packs, loaded with all the mountaineering gear that we would never need in Australia but still thought would be fun to play with.

Our massive basecamp tent.

Snowshoes and skis were donned (mainly snowshoes in those conditions; everything was solid ice) and we set off into the hinterland of Australia's best attempt at alps. It was only a few kilometres across the broad snow-covered bowls to our campsite. In the lea of North Ramshead's peak - its ice-studded rocks jutting out of the snow above us, a five metre high wall of snow had formed that sheltered a small bowl from the weekend's prevailing winds. Great location though it was, the campsite wasn't why we were there.

We dug tent platforms, pitched tents and donned crampons for what is technically known as sliding down snow on your bum. When had we forgotten how much fun that simple activity is? We knew it as children, appreciated its brilliance then, but as adults we'd taken on the mindset that one should remain standing on the snow. Poppycock! Bums all the way.

Self-arresting was easy at first, starting our slides feet-first on our bellies, with the axe practically in the snow already. It evolved rapidly until we were taking running dives, sliding head-first on our backs and having to spin our iceaxes three times before starting to self-arrest. On the short stretch of slope we'd found, we were hard pressed to spin the axe, roll over, turn around and come to a stop before we reached the bottom. We had to go back and do it again? Oh shucks, how ever would we cope?

Our leader atop
North Ramshead.

Then we were released onto North Ramshead's icy peak, crampons sending shards of ice flying whenever we slipped, ice-axes struggling to find purchase when controlled by inept fingers. It was an easy ascent, but we made it difficult by taking the worst lines to give ourselves some practice. We were far from experts when we eventually descended the far side of the peak (and went up and down it a few times, because it was fun) but we'd grasped some of the basics.

Back at camp, avalanche rescue training began. A transceiver was buried out in the dark and one by one, we would track it down then pinpoint it using a snowprobe and dig it out, only to bury it again somewhere else for someone else to have a turn. When my turn came, I was disappointed by how easy it was to locate the beason and determined that my successor would not have such an easy time of it. I dug a hole half a metre down to the bedrock, replaced the snow in blocks exactly as it had come out, then smoothed over the surface. Nearby (near enough for anyone being lazy with the transceiver to not check more carefully) I disturbed a large expanse of snow enough to make it clear it had recently been dug over, then returned to camp and gave the transceiver to the next in line.

My successor had more mountaineering experience than most of us, and everyone was expecting him back in no time. We could see his torch out in the darkness and, as he kept digging, I knew he'd taken the bait of the obvious diggings. It was nearly half an hour later that he returned to camp.

With all the waiting around doing nothing, I eventually took a spare shovel and dug most of a snowcave to keep myself moving in the rapidly cooling night. Then the nine of us moved into the club's basecamp Hilleberg for a few hours of tips and anecdotes about mountaineering before sleep claimed us. It was a cold night up there, but I was warm in a nice sleeping bag and with a thick insulated sleeping mat between me and the snow. My tent buddy had decided her old thermarest and a reasonable sleeping bag would suffice... The sleeping bag was adequate but the thermarest wasn't. She alone on the trip had opted for a single thermarest (others were either using Expeds or a combination of closed cell mat for insulation and thermarest for comfort) and was the only one to report having had a cold night when morning arrived.

Testing the snow-pack.

We broke camp quickly, setting off across the plateau to find ourselves a slope to do compression tests. This simple test (at its core, simply hitting snow with a shovel to see what happens) is used to test for avalanche danger. We excavated a pit into the side of a slope, used an ice-saw to isolate columns of snow from their surroundings and tapped the top with varying force to see what happened. While the test method proved simple, interpreting the subtle shifts in the snow was less so. We were going to need a lot more practice to know what they meant. Fortunately this particular snow-pack was the side of Kosciusko, and even we could tell there was no chance of it sliding off the mountain.

Although it looks lower than its surroundings, the vaguely mound-like rise is the peak of Kosciusko.

From there we ascended onward up the side of the severely anticlimactic "peak" of Australia*. Kosciusko has to be one of the most disappointing mountains I've ever seen, and has probably only been granted the title in sympathy for being an utterly non-mountainous highest mountain in the country. We had to walk a long way down and away from the normal ascent path to find anywhere steep enough to practice our compression tests and use crampons. Soon enough we were on all fours, "daggering" our way up the slope by plunging our iceaxe picks in with each step. We ascended rapidly to the ridgeline approaching Kosci, got a few photos looking utterly ridiculous in all our gear and had to dash to make it to camp, pack up and do some more avalanche rescue training before the lifts back at Thredbo closed. The snowshoers caught the chairlift back down, while the skiers attempted to ski to the base of the mountain. Australian ski fields are tiny, but it took an hour and a half for them to reach us at the bottom. The trails were nothing but groomed ice studded with shards of rock.

And then, but for some pizzas in Jindabyne, our weekend adventure was at an end and we wended our weary way back north to Canberra.

* It should be noted that we were climbing to the peak of Australia the continent, not Australia the country. That title is held by Big Ben on Heard Island. Its highest point, 2745m at Mawson Peak, tops Kosciuszko by over 500m. It's a proper mountain, too, being an active volcano rising directly out of the Indian Ocean that is host to 14 glaciers.

 

Icebergs, blizzards and 80km/h winds

Guthega dam wall and reservoir.

Despite the title's suggestion that I spent a weekend in Antarctica, my journey was actually into the rolling hills mountains of Australia. I would be overjoyed if the Australian National University Mountaineering Club did do regular trips down to Antarctica, but alas I must accept the offered trips to the Snowy Mountains instead. A group of eight skiers set off from Canberra in the early hours of Saturday morning, journeying south for the town of Jindabyne that spreads along the shore of a hydro lake by the same name. There we abducted Peter Luk and made for the mountains before anyone could notice our departure. It isn't far from Jindabyne to the snow and half an hour had us donning ski boots for the trip ahead.

Our entry point into the mountains was Guthega, a back-route into the Perisher ski resort and access point for the winter playgrounds of Twynham and Blue Lake. Quite apart from its convenient proximity to both, the route starting from Guthega also provides an excellent vantage point over the highest reservoir of the Snowy Mountains Hydroelectric Scheme, which - at 1585m and well above the snow-line - is partially or completely frozen over for the greater part of the winter months. A few days since the water had last frozen over, we were treated to a view of broken ice-flows strewn across the reservoir. One skier, previously an Antarctic tour guide, said it reminded her of piloting zodiacs through the southern ice-sheets. Somehow, we had forgotten to bring boats for our trip into the mountains. Alas, we were forced to travel on foot instead.

Skiers forced to walk beside the Guthega reservoir.

Skiing our way along the reservoir's steeply sloped bank was no easy task. Keeping the same edges of our skis dug into the slope for an extended period might have proved tiring, but instead proved unnecessary. From the first bridge at Blue Cow Creek - which was built in 2010 to replace the flying fox first installed in the early 60s - there wasn't much skiing to be had until we'd passed Illawong Lodge and crossed the swing bridge across the upper Snowy River. Poor cover, soft snow and many ski-snaring bushes kept us carrying our skis and walking most of the way in our heavy plastic boots.

From there we could strap in and turn our skis uphill. There was no particular destination in mind, just somewhere with deep enough snow to dig ourselves a snowcave and some good slopes nearby to go skiing. There certainly weren't any promising drifts near the bridge, nor along the first stretch route. It was difficult enough finding good snow for skiing, let alone digging. The slopes had been scoured of any fresh snow by 90km/h winds the night before, leaving vast sheets of boilerplate ice to which our telemark skis' fish-scaled bases struggled to stick. Progress was slow but we weren't travelling all that far.

Diggers hitting grass.
Photo courtesy of Clare Paynter.

We found ourselves a snowbank in the lee of a copse of snowgums, dropped packs and took up our shovels. We weren't aiming to fit all eight of us inside a snowcave but the bigger the cave, the fewer tents we would need to pitch in the snow. Although our chosen drift was shallow and we hit grass soon after we started digging, it proved deep and wide enough to dig a shelter for four skiers. We dug platforms for a couple of tents, excavated a kitchen and didn't skimp on the wind barriers or guy ropes. The weather forecast said our nice moderate breeze would soon be turning into a full gale* and no one wanted to be outside reinforcing half-collapsed tents during the night.

The wind was already picking up and the temperature dropping as we cooked our meals, stoves melting their way down into the snow. After passing around some Whittaker's Peanut Butter Chocolate, a new-found favourite of mine for any winter trip, we vanished into our tents to wrap ourselves in sleeping bags. I was glad for our extra campsite preparations, lying and listening to the wind roaring through the branches of  the nearby snowgums.

Snow banked around the Hilleberg.

When dawn struck our campsite, its rays fell upon a sight quite unlike the one that sunset had left behind. We didn't measure the depth of new snow, but I had to dig up almost half a metre of fresh snow to reveal my entire tent. Watching the snow building up against the walls overnight, I had almost gone outside before dawn to do some digging. Ultimately though, enough snow was being blown back off it that it was in no danger of collapsing.

With no sign of the snowcave residents emerging from their slumber, I launched my trainer kite.The wind was a bit low for the 2.5m² foil to let me build up any real speed, but my GPS still clocked me at 19km/h across the flat stretch of snow I'd chosen. Normally that would have felt painfully slow but this was my first time snow-kiting on telemarks and I'd intentionally left my larger depower kite at home. Despite my initial misgivings about kiting with my heels loose, the telemarks performed almost identically to my alpine skis. By the time I returned, the skiers back at camp were geared up and donning skis to take advantage of all the fresh snow.

A good slope had been found the previous afternoon, a few hundred metres from camp, but the consensus of those who had skied it had been that it was too icy. Smothered in fresh snow, it was a dream. The "powder" snow of Australia's Snowy Mountains is a far cry from its counterpart found in Canada and Japan, but it still made for beautiful skiing. I tried several attempts at telemark turns, which varied only in the impressiveness of their concluding crashes. With thick padding to fall into, it was a pleasantly pain-free way to experiment with the style, to the point where I started looking forward to crashing. Grown complacent in my alpine resort skiing, it's become increasingly rare for me to crash impressively. Far from undermining my confidence, this succession of - sometimes high-speed - crashes was reminding me that I can crash and live to tell the tale.

A few of the icicles that formed on the windward side of my car.

We couldn't play forever. Soon it was time to pack away our tents and ski our way back to Guthega. The going was easier with a nice new layer of snow paving our way, and we enjoyed a much more pleasant return journey. Alas the fresh snow had played havoc with our cars. Mine, parked in Guthega's bottom carpark, was thoroughly coated in ice but required only minor excavations and some defrosting to get it moving. The trip's other Forester (because what other car would we be using on an ANUMC trip?) had found parking closer to Guthega but had been completely buried in snow. Two people with shovels took more than half an hour to clear away enough snow to get it moving. Despite the good time we'd made skiing the return journey, the sun had well and truly set before we started driving through the snowbound landscape between us and Canberra.

* Wind gusts up to 80km/h were recorded overnight at the nearest weather station, officially a "strong gale" on the Beaufort scale.