If you've got one free day in Australia in early September, what would you do?
About a month ago I found out that I was going to be working on a project in Australia. Due to my work and flight schedule, I had a “free” Saturday. I traveled to Australia for the first time this past January and for my “free” day I booked a beginner surfing session. It was a fun trip, but to say I went surfing is somewhat of an overstatement. I floundered in the ocean for a few hours, was totally exhausted but managed to get upright long enough for this photo.
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Yeah, I suck at surfing!
It didn’t take me long to realize that it was still WINTER in “The Land of OZ”, and I have never skied in the southern hemisphere! It was at this point that my little brain started racing and I started doing some serious research on the good ol’ internet. Then I realized that where I was staying, Melbourne is fairly close to some pretty good skiing. (OK, it isn’t New Zealand, but the mountains are real and the snow was there)!
It was decided. I wasn’t going to pass up this chance, (photo courtesy of Mike Garrett).
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Weather and snow conditions permitting, this is what I had set my sights on. This is what I wanted to do with MY DAY!
This is Mt. Feathertop near the Hotham Ski Resort. Yes, I could have just bought a ticket to the ski area, but that would have been too simple, too boring. In my research I found a healthy, vibrant community of backcountry aficionados who shared my passion for human powered snow adventures. The guys on the backcountry forum thread that I found had several recommendations, but the one that kept coming up as being a good option was the Razorback Ridge, with Mt. Feathertop as the end goal.
Lining up a partner was the next obstacle that I needed to address. Again, this same group had some recommendations and I ended up getting lined up with Mike G, an anesthesiologist from the Melbourne area, who spends a lot of time up in the Hotham area. https://www.tetongravity.com/images/...ike__forum.jpgHe agreed to meet me there and be my “guide” for the day. Initially the plan was to take the full day, but then Mike ended up needing to get back for family duties around mid-afternoon. This was fine with me, I was just glad to be leveraging some local knowledge and I had a big drive back to Melbourne. The time constraints did impact our decision making out in the field.
I did some sifting thru the TGR forum and harvested some useful nuggets on logistics and packing equipment for an international trip such as this. In the end, I determined to take everything with me. I was flying United and studied up on their policies on the website. By taking a nice ski bag, and cramming as much of my lightweight gear in it as I could, and then using my suitcase as a “boot bag”, I was able to avoid any extra baggage charges, (on the return, I used my backpack as the “boot bag”. The only hiccup in this whole deal was not thinking about having my avy shovel in my pack as a carry-on on the departing flight. https://www.tetongravity.com/images/...pon__forum.jpg Umm yeah, turns out the TSA frowns on shovels in your carry-on luggage, even if it is for life saving purposes. Oh, yeah and they didn’t like that pocket knife that I had forgot I always have in my first aid kit, which was stuffed in the bottom of the pack. A quick sprint back to the baggage check-in and I was able to stuff the shovel and first aid kit in my ski bag.
My primary reason for being in Australia was working on a big software roll-out for hp. So, I only had Saturday to do the backcountry ski trek. I rented a car for the weekend, (in spite of my fear of driving on the “wrong side” of the road for the first time ever). And at 12:20 AM Saturday morning I headed out from Melbourne to Hotham/Dinner Plain to pick up Mike. One quick fuel stop, a very close call with a deer on a blind corner in the dark, a not-so-close call with a couple of kangaroos and five hours later I was at the resort. The GPS got me close, but it still took several minutes to actually find Mike’s place.
By the time we got back to the trailhead for Razorback Ridge, it was around 6:30 AM. It took me just a few minutes to get the skins on and get ready to go. Mike had warned me that the one disadvantage to doing this trek was that we would need to transition quite a bit. No matter how strong he would have emphasized this point, it would have been an understatement. We had soooo many transitions, I lost track of them. The “ridge” isn’t really a ridge, it is more of a series of little hill tops with sharp saddles and drainages between them. That explains the need to transition often. In addition to this, it seemed to me that it was mainly uphill, (both ways), but that’s only because I’m getting old and wasn’t really in top ski trekking condition.
We made it out to a knob known as Molly Hill. At this point we were 4 hours into the trek, and we still had a big saddle to get down and across as well as another 500 ft. of elevation to climb. Another factor in play was that the high cloud cover was hindering the corn formation and we were concerned that the steep pitches on Feathertop that we were looking at might be a bit firm.
Given the above factors, the constraints on Mike’s time, the fact that I’d been up since midnight and still had a 5 hour drive after I got back to the car, it seemed prudent to abandon the Feathertop idea and start picking off some of the nice corn lines back along the Razorback. We ended up getting two primary ones with some good vertical, and a half dozen other small ones on the way.
After the 2nd major line, Mike and I split up. He was much faster climbing than I was and he had to get back to the family. I was fine with “plodding along” and taking my time to get back to the vehicle. At 2:30PM – 8 hours, 12+ miles and 3200 vertical feet covered – I arrived back at the rental car. The trip back to Melbourne was far more pleasant than the trip out. Beautiful scenery, great weather, an awesome sunset and the lights of the city, augmented with a constant intake of diet coke and snacks provided ample stimulus to keep me awake and alert as I reflected on my day.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lr7Ia-WnYK8
Cool shot of Feathertop in the clouds as we head out,
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Area where we skied
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(photos courtesy of Mike Garrett)
Random action shots courtesy of Mike Garret
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A couple of shots of Mike in action:
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Wheels up and view from the air...
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Epilogue
So, was it worth it? For me, most definitely!
If someone were to ask me how it could have been better, I’d say obviously if you had 2-3 days that would be much better. Also, if your only real target was to ski Feathertop, I would do a different route. There are two options, one involves a 4 wheel drive and the other a bigger hike, but both are more direct and for me, the insane number of transitions was tiring, as well as time consuming. I would have rather just had a steady uphill climb all the way, did the skiing and then headed back out.
If I was heading for this part of the world on my own dollar, I’d head for New Zealand. But if one has a reason, such as I did, to be in Australia during their winter, I would most definitely try to make the logistics work out and get some turns in!
