The wrong white water

Before I go any further, I must warn any rafting readers that the following post may prove disturbing.

Upon moving to Canberra, I looked around for a convenient student group with whom I could go white water rafting. Alas, it seems rafting is not the sport of choice for Canberrans*. So I took up other activities, went canyoning and rock-climbing, got into mountaineering and started sea kayaking. I kayaked on the lake and did a couple of trips out to the coast to paddle there, even tried surfing a kayak. What I did not do was try paddling a kayak on a river.

Rafting down in Tasmania, I met my fair share of kayakers. A lot of them had been rafters once, but turned to kayaking to escape the inevitable faff of rafting's large groups and excessive gear. Others sought the greater thrill and challenge of kayaking, or just a whole lot less work in portaging around rapids. Whatever the reason for their transition, it was seldom reversible; very few returned to rafting after taking up its dark cousin as a pastime, and those exceptions would often bring their kayaks on trips rather than risk boarding a raft. Clearly the kayaks had seductive powers beyond the strength of mere mortals to resist, making any transition a one-way trip. I had gone so far as to take up sea-kayaking and even surf-kayaking—while it's technically possible to surf a raft, the ocean waves are scarcely their element—but I was leaving the rivers to the rafts... until Sunday.

I should have resisted, should have fought harder against the threat kayaking posed to my rafting integrity. Honestly though, I missed the river. There's something awesome about sitting in a river flowing at 70 cumecs†—power enough to crush you in an instant—and looking at the surface but seeing what's hidden beneath it. The combined sense of helplessness against something so strong and confidence from knowing what to do to make it across that water alive is one that I cherish. I hadn't had that feeling since rafting the Franklin over the summer, and wanted to feel it again. Nearly ten years rafting doesn't qualify me for kayaking though, which is a whole new level of terror with a whole lot less control. I wasn't sitting in a kayak anywhere near the rivers I was used to, and there hadn't been any beginners white water kayaking trips in a while. Then one was posted on the ANUMC website, a grade 1-2 section of the Murrumbidgee. So I donned my new ladies' wetsuit (I'll start buying men's outdoor clothing again when the manufacturers stop assuming that all men are overweight and start making clothes for men who are fit because they spend time outdoors), armoured lifejacket and a helmet with my latest ad hoc GoPro mount. After discovering that my knees don't get along well with bracing in a lot of white water kayaks, I spent some time sitting in different kayaks until stumbling across one that wasn't just bearable but was actually comfortable.

We strapped kayaks onto the club trailer and towed it to the get-in at Tharwa Bridge. From there, it was less than 15km down to our get-out at Pine Island. Alas, most of those kilometres turned out to be flat paddling. In between though, there were rapids... well, close enough. Tassie rafters, think of the lower Derwent, only with a few more trees mid-river and without the actually becalmed sections. I assume that any other paddlers will know of a mostly flat river suitable for beginners that can be used as a comparison. On a raft, I would have been dead-bored (my usual way of keeping myself entertained on flat water is to flip my own raft, flip someone else's raft or otherwise conspire to have more people swimming than are in the boats). I could have done with shorter sections of flat-water, but the rapids proved a good introduction to white water kayaking.

The first few rapids were all firmly in grade 1 and easily passed. Then we hit a grade 2. On a raft, I would have paddled straight over the top without pausing, certainly without scouting. The wave train would have given me a moment's entertainment, and that would have been it. A group comprising no small number of beginners needed to be more cautious. A couple of experienced kayakers went ahead to scout, pulling into eddies to point the way for those following behind as we wove between willow saplings. It was easier than I'd expected, kayaks having a lot less momentum to fight against in order to turn them. It was just as terrifying as I'd expected. Let me stress, this was an easy rapid, requiring some quick turns to follow the best lines but with plenty of good lines to choose from. I would have been more than happy to swim it, but apparently kayaking it is a whole different story. My adrenaline levels went through buzz and rush, then kept climbing.

I will gladly confess that I'm an adrenaline junky, but I like it to be delivered in levels that give me an edge and focus my senses, not overwhelm my rationality. I haven't hit the panic level in a few years, and I was quite happy keeping it that way. Apparently skirting around an itsy bitsy stopper at the end of a rapid and having my kayak roll ever so slightly was enough to trigger a panic response. All these years of steadily dosing myself with adrenaline must have been good for something, because I successfully fought the urge to run away (which would simply have resulted in me rolling upside-down) and made it through the rapid without a hitch. When my heart stopped sounding like a bodhrán beating out a quick jig, I realised that I was actually enjoying myself.

If you look closely, you might notice the

boat rock slightly at 0:36. 

There were a few more rapids at similar levels, which lacked the blind terror of the first and helped to remind me that this was an easy river. If I had flipped (which seemed to be my greatest fear) I would just have wet-exited and swam (which didn't scare me at all), rather than faff around trying to set up and perform my somewhat unreliable brace-roll. Most of the group portaged (hoisted boats onto shoulders and walked) one rapid, basically because it was completely choked with willows and we all portaged over the Point Hut bridge with it's recirculating stopper.

Shortly before the end of our section of river, we came across a boat, upside-down and pinned beneath a log. First thing to check: whether there was a body in it. 

Fortunately it was body-free. It was also clearly a flat water craft, meant for fishing on a lake and never intended to tackle white water. We pulled it free and it half-floated briefly before sinking like a stone.

Towing the "rescued" kayak to shore.

Most of the group were all for heading back then, and we paddled the last rapid to the get-out. Three of us kept our lifejackets on, grabbed some rope and walked back up the riverbank. The kayak was submerged mid-river, wrapped on some rocks. We had to swim across channels up to chest-deep before we could reach it. Getting it unstuck proved simple, but returning to shore burdened with a kayak was a more difficult task. We barely had it out of the water when someone came looking for us, car shuffle and packing of the trailer now complete. Triumphantly carrying our prize back, we encountered someone who had just bought an identical kayak and was considering rafting the next section (grade 3-4). Fortunately he was somewhat dissuaded by the condition of the boat we'd retrieved. I sincerely hope I never become that complacent about kayaking on white water, but I'm glad that my spine-crushing terror has faded.

*Early on, I heard Canberra residents described a few times as Canberrites and Canberrians, but Canberrans seems to be the term of choice.

†A cumec is a unit often used by white water paddlers to measure river flow. It stands for cubic metres per second and is the volume of water that passes through one point on a river every second. In theory, it's easy to calculate. All you need is the cross-sectional area of the river, and the average flow rate across that area. In practice, it's almost impossible to measure either number. Yes, you can measure the width of the river, but the depth varies across that width. Yes you can measure the flow of one point in the river, but that varies even more across the width and depth of the river, with eddies (backflow) actually forming along the banks and riverbed. Fortunately there are companies (generally running hydroelectric schemes) who survey rivers and work out their flow rates at different levels, and then give the numbers to anyone who wants them.

Faffing about gerunds

FAF, or faff, is a word that I have found in common usage among outdoor clubs. Faffing is the process of wasting time or being unnecessarily slow and delaying the group you're with. Faffers are those who faff habitually and are almost always late. It's a word well-suited to such clubs and I rarely encountered it anywhere else. This—I thought—was because of the word's origins. FAF was first introduced to me as an acronym standing for F**k Around Factor. I accepted the etymology then and thought no more on the matter, until I decided to look it up in a dictionary. Why I thought it would even be listed remains a mystery to this day, but still I checked and discovered—not "FAF" as I had sought—an entry for "faff" instead.

The OED defines faff as a verb meaning to fuss or to dither. It traces its usage back to 1874 and its etymology back even further to faffle, whose use was recorded in Manipulus Vocabulorum* in 1570. Clearly faff had more history than I had suspected. I thought little more of the matter then, apart from now considering it usable in polite company^†.

But there's more to faff than I'd first thought. Faff is a verb (or "doing word," as my few school-level grammar lessons quite inadequately described them). As well as their shared semantic (meaning-based) traits, verbs share morphological (form-based) and syntactic (structural) traits. This isn't a lesson on verbs (a word class that I'm only beginning to understand), so I'll ignore almost all the traits of verbs and focus on one in particular. In English, verbs cannot be preceded by articles (eg. the, a, an). Articles precede nouns, not verbs. Try saying a few and see how they sound.

"I can write a sentence," sounds fine, but "and the result is the write I have made" does not. Similarly, "I could edit that last sentence to be grammatically correct," sounds fine—if a little formal—but "and the result would be an edit I have made" sounds... fine actually, overly formal but not wrong, per se. That's odd.

So, verbs can't be preceded by articles, except where—apparently—they can. In these cases, the verb is being used as a noun. These are a form of nominalization, where non-nouns can be used as nouns. What does this have to do with faff? Faff may be defined as a verb, but it's now double-timing as a noun on the side. If I faff around all morning, the faff that results can be overwhelming. This all seems like a pretty long-winded way of getting to the point, but I'm talking about wasting time so that seems appropriate.

What does this have to do with this post's title? Gerunds are a particular type of nominalization (specifically, non-finite verb phrases than can be used as noun phrases). They appear in several languages and are pretty easy to spot in English. Just keep an eye out for nouns that look suspiciously like verbs in the perfect participle (also known as the present participle). What am I talking about? Basically, verbs that end in -ing: I am running (verb) more since being inspired by watching the running (noun) last week. Keep an ear out for them next time you're waiting for people to stop faffing about; they're actually pretty common.

* Manipulus Vocabulorum, published in 1570, is a dictionary of Latin and English that was the first dictionary to organise words by rhyme. Despite the claim that Table Alphabeticall, published in 1604, was the first monolingual dictionary (that is, it lists words from a language along with definitions written in that same language), Manipulus Vocabulorum includes a section that gives English definitions for English words.

^† I was once asked what FAF meant by someone to whom the definition as I knew it would have been terribly offensive. Suffice to say, I'm more than happy to give the definition of faff if requested.

Summer Sorbets

As September struck Canberra, it brought with it the hottest start of spring on record. Although peak temperatures soon dropped back into the mid teens, the brief foray over 25°C was enough to set my summer tastebuds racing. What were they craving? Sorbet.

My introduction to sorbets took place somewhen back in the fog of early childhood, and lemon sorbet has been a favourite of mine for as long as I can remember. Tragically, it was succeeded last summer, ousted from its place by my sister's sorbet experiments. Her gin & tonic sorbet was delicious, but lime was the real challenger. Now, living 850 km away from her experiments, I've found myself craving homemade sorbets once more. Fortunately, recipes can be emailed easily. Unfortunately, icecream makers can't.

Enter Sam Tan's blog, on which she describes a simple method to make sorbets without the use of an icecream maker. The ingredients are not dissimilar from most sorbet recipes and I glossed over the list in my habitually non-attentive manner. The important thing is how to freeze the mix, not what it contains. Unfortunately it isn't a quick freeze, so the sorbet really has to be prepared the day before consumption. Feel free to play with the quantities; I always do.

Basic Sorbet Mixture

• 1 cup white sugar
• 2 cups water
• 1 egg white
• Flavouring
• Wine (not only optional but, some might argue, entirely unrelated to the recipe)
• Novel of choice

The quantity of flavouring required varies greatly, not just by your personal taste but also by what sorbet you're making. I've put some below that are to my taste.

• Start off by making a sugar syrup. Combine the sugar and water in a saucepan on medium heat. Stir until sugar has dissolved then allow to cool.
• While your syrup is cooling, whisk the egg white until it forms stiff peaks.

  

  Scum!

• Combine your flavouring of choice with the sugar syrup. Pour combined syrup slowly into your egg whites while whisking gently. If you're used to making a meringue by pouring sugar syrup into beaten egg whites, don't panic when you don't get the usual gloriously silky cream. Instead, you should be expecting cloudy liquid topped with a thin layer of white scum. Yes, it does look that unappetising, but I guarantee you that it improves later.

So far, this is quite similar to the recipe books that come with most icecream makers (although they probably don't tell you that a layer of scum is a good thing). At this point, you'd transfer it to your machine and turn it on. Then all you'd have to do is sit back with a glass of wine and your favourite novel for an hour while waiting for your glorious sorbet to make itself. This isn't quite so simple, but don't abandon the wine yet.

• Pour your sorbet mixture (scum and all) into a lidded container and put it in the freezer. The sorbet will expand while freezing and again in later processing. Choose a container large enough to allow for this.
• Sit back with your wine and novel, because there's nothing for you to do for a while.
• Check the sorbet after a couple of hours. When the sides are frozen and the rest of the sorbet has formed an icy slush, stir thoroughly and return to the freezer. It needs to be left for at least three to four hours, but can be left overnight.
• When the sorbet is completely frozen and firm but not solid, transfer it to a food processor and blend thoroughly, stopping to scrape down the sides as necessary. When it is smooth and consistent, return the sorbet to its container and place it back in the freezer.

  

  Sorbet separates while freezing.

• Leave the sorbet for several hours until hard. It will probably separate slightly with a darker layer at the bottom of the container. Blend again until it becomes white and fluffy. Serve immediately or return to the freezer for later.

There you have it, a simple—although time-consuming—method to produce amazing sorbets without an icecream machine. I've listed a few of my preferred recipes below for some inspiration:

Lemon Sorbet
A simple, classic combination of citric tartness with the smooth sweetness of sorbet.

• 1 cup white sugar
• 2 cups water
• 1 egg white
• 1 1/2 cups lemon juice (freshly squeezed is preferable, but not necessary)
• Zest of two lemons

Follow the method for a basic sorbet.

Lime Sorbet
Lime juice has a stronger flavour to it than most citrus, and you need less for your sorbet. Test the flavour as you go though; you can add more juice after the first or second freeze.

• 1 cup white sugar
• 2 cups water
• 1 egg white
• 1 cup lime juice (freshly squeezed is preferable, but not necessary)
• Zest of two limes

Follow method for a basic sorbet.

Ginger Sorbet

This is an unusual one that I tried as an experiment. If you're a ginger fan, this balance of sweet, tart and a good tingle from the ginger is for you. It's a particularly good one to try if you make your own crystallised or glacé ginger.

• 3/4 cup white sugar
• 1 1/2 cups water
• 1 egg white
• 1/4 cup ginger syrup (leftover from making glacé ginger)
• 1-2 cm fresh ginger, finely grated
• 1/4 cup lemon juice

Add the ginger syrup and grated fresh ginger along with the sugar and water when making the syrup. Add the lemon juice after it has cooled. Then follow the rest of the method for a basic sorbet.

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.

Week #15: Failure to Communicate

I'm grouping Saturday into this, because I may not get a chance to post anything tomorrow in the final hours before departure. In that case, this will be the final post before the walk starts. Don't panic; despite the account that follows, I'm actually not ill-prepared for the trip.

The first preparation for this walk was a weekend spent testing search and rescue comms gear. We used radios and mobile phones, but no sat phones. After this week, I think I know why. There are two sat phone networks available in Australia, one which is affordable and one used only by those with extreme government subsidies or a seven digit salary. It took half a week and a lot of preparation time going through various satellite phones to work out that they shared a common problem; all of them used the network I could afford to connect to for a month without selling my kidneys on the black market. This didn't seem like a problem at the time, but the biggest ones never do...

Half of my week's moving and preparation time was lost to attempting to connect various satellite phones before I gave up. Secondhand phones had been a mistake, I decided; it was time to cut my losses and try another tactic. Normally I wouldn't bother, but we do need to be able to coordinate with walkers meeting us halfway and drivers picking up those leaving before the end. All I really need to be able to do is let people know which campsite we've settled into each night, something a full satellite phone is over-qualified to do.

A new solution appeared. I had heard of Spot GPS Messengers and Spot Connects before. They're GPS units which relay short messages and GPS coordinates through to pre-selected recipients via satellites. Essentially, push a button when you get to camp and it'll tell people where you are. Press a different button and it'll send a different message along with those coordinates. Another one calls for help from your family, while the last forwards straight through to emergency services. The variation between the two types is that the GPS Messenger sends messages that you set beforehand, while the Spot Connect links to a smartphone via bluetooth to send custom messages. A Spot Connect seemed like introducing a whole new range of points of failure. A GPS Messenger though, sounded perfect. Without the full range of features on most satellite phones, they're pretty cheap, lightweight and their batteries last for months.

By this time, it was Thursday and I had only a few days left before the walk started on Monday. I found one GPS Messenger available for sale in Hobart, snatched it up on Friday morning and opened a satellite account. I set aside some of my remaining preparation and moving time to set it up and sent off my first test message. The lights flashed, acquiring GPS coordinates from one satellite network and then sending them through another. Twenty minutes passed and no sign of the message. I tried again with no luck, and then tried customer service, a mobile phone somewhere in Australia set to redirect to a call centre in the US.

Don't panic, it's just a calibration problem. All I had to do was restart it and leave it in the open for twenty minutes while it set itself up for the local satellite service. Seemed strange, but I gave it a try. Further trials yielded no results and the call centre had closed for the day. They were due to reopen at midnight, and I set about cleaning my old house until then.

Midnight came around and my call soon followed. The advice for fixing the problems grew steadily stranger and more inconvenient. Firstly I had to send a message in one location with clear view of the sky (a process that takes 20 minutes of waiting while it tries to connect) and then I had to move to a different location and try again within ten minutes. The flashing lights at both indicated the messages had been sent, though neither arrived at the phone in my pocket. So, after around an hour of jogging around at 1am and then sitting in the chill Tasmanian spring air, I returned to the house and called them again. Clearly my account settings were wrong. They checked them and lo and behold, I had put symbols in my contact phone number. For some crazy reason, I had thought +61 would precede the phone number! Oh, wait a minute... no after some explaining it was realised their computers had added this when I set my country. Matters didn't improve. After jumping through hoops for a while, even tracking down another set of lithium AAA batteries at 3am, I gave up and grabbed a couple of hours of sleep. Daylight makes everything better.

Satellite phones don't like daylight as much as I do, it would seem. Dawn did arrive, but it didn't bring any great wave of communication capabilities. Another conversation with the call centre and they decided my unit was faulty. No problems though, there was one I could swap it with in a store just over in Unley Road. I'd never heard of it but duly looked it up, only to discover the shop was actually in South Australia. Some careful explaining that I'm in Tasmania and this would be inconvenient clearly had no effect, as I was asked how long it would take me to drive to Unley Road. Why, no time at all. An hour in a car would get me there, getting out partway to take two flights.

"There's one in Devonport, how far away is that?"

Why, that would only take four hours to drive there, a couple of days to wait around until they were open and four hours to drive back. Easy!

"How long are you staying in Tasmania?"

I live here, which is why my account's address is in Tasmania.

"How far is it for you to drive to Adelaide?"

I gave up around then; clearly there's something incomprehensible about Australian geography and our blatant refusal to drive cars on water. I took to the internet, seeking a solution in its depths. Lo and behold, I found it. The problem isn't the device (although the pattern of indicator lights do indicate that it's faulty). The problem is that Tasmania is just too far south for satellite coverage.

That's right, the satellite phone network (advertised as covering another hundred kilometres or so south of Tasmania), actually falls short. Occasional bursts of signal make it through but nothing that the Spot's tiny antenna can use, nor (from what I've observed this past week) anything usable by a more conventional satellite phone to send a two character text message. So next time a mainlander tells me (as is their wont) that Tasmanians have no concept of large distances or being isolated, I'll just ask them whether any of the mainland is so remote that it's out of range of a worldwide satellite communication network*.

So, how are we going to communicate? There's dodgy reception on a few mountain peaks approaching the meeting points and that'll have to do us. Connectivity is intermittent, but is enough for sending an SMS. I never thought I'd say this, but it turns out that (in Tasmania at least) Telstra's restricted GSM network has better coverage than satellites. Considering how bad the GSM network in Tasmania is, that's really saying something about the satellites.

*Yes, I have been waiting years for a suitable response to this comment, frequently used by a few mainlanders I know. Though if any of them read this blog, they probably won't say it again.

Weekend #15: Moving

Second last weekend of preparation is now complete. What did I do with it? Well I dehydrated a few things, obviously, before packing the drier away for a while. It’s work is done for now, though it may reappear briefly in the next few days. I made a groundsheet for the damn sexy tent*, a bright red one to tie on top of the otherwise well-camouflaged tent in the unlikely event of an emergency mid-walk.

Other than that, the weekend was spent starting the move out of my house. Unfortunately, while an emergency is unlikely, there's a certainty that my lease runs out mid-walk, so I have to do all my moving before heading off. There is no way that the amount of stuff I’m taking out of this house could have physically fit into it in the first place. Of this, I am absolutely certain. It makes me wonder exactly where all these boxes did come from, but certainly not from here!

*If you’re wondering what the damn sexy tent is, you’ve obviously been skipping posts. Stop skipping posts!