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.