David and Enid's Travels

Billy Button Daisy

This morning we walked on the Goldseekers Trail.  It is a dual purpose trail used for walking in summer and as a cross country ski trail in the winter.  Because of it’s ski trail nature it was well signed with tall posts.  The trail passes through alpine meadows and snow gum forest with a myriad of wildflowers.  A few of the flowers were identified on sign posts; however, most of them are unfamiliar to us.

At the start of the trail we saw a man in a small camper van, and he asked us where the trail was (the trail head sign is actually across the road from where the trail starts on the east side of the highway).  We asked to see inside his van as we were thinking about something similar to use in Tasmania.  However he suggested that a car and tent would be just as good for a short time.  On talking to him we learned that he and his wife have been doing a great number of adventures similar to ours since they retired 15 years ago in Switzerland.  He was a very well preserved 73 years old, and said his wife no longer wants to go on wilderness canoe trips as she is concerned about how to manage if something should happen to him.  However, he was on a kayaking trip in the Yukon in the last year or so.

At about the mid-point of the hike there are the remains of old gold mines in this area.  The area first opened with a short lived gold rush in the 1860’s, but was actively small scale mined until about 1950.  There are some old shafts visible, and the decayed remains of old mining equipment. 

We hiked to the top of the downhill ski area (Selwyn Snowfields) at the end of the trail and ate our lunch outside the deserted chalet.  There are a large number of chair lifts here, but the runs can’t be too long as there is only a little over 100 m vertical drop.  It reminded me very much of Saskatchewan’s Table Mountain ski area.

We came back and swam in the lake here.  I anticipated it would be cold because of our altitude (about 1500 m) but it was surprisingly warm.  As it’s a dam I also thought it would probably drop quickly, but it didn’t and it was just a gentle slope to the bottom.  It wasn’t the greatest swimming, but a great way to get cleaned off after the hike.  The only problem is the horse flies (they call them “March Flies” here) which are thick and aggressive, especially by the water.  We retreated to the interior of our motorhome, which fortunately is nice and cool this afternoon, and spent some time deciding what we will do when we go to Tasmania in February.

Snowy Mountains, Western Fall of the Main Range

We left Geehi this morning and drove along the very narrow Alpine Way towards Khancoban.  There are several places along this road that go through deep rock cuts, and the road is very narrow.  It would be very difficult to get two motorhomes our size through if they met, but fortunately we didn’t meet anything large.  In fact the traffic was pretty light.  We pulled off to the viewpoint at Scammell’s Ridge Lookout, which has a spectacular view back towards the wall of the main range of the Snowy Mountains.  The area was pretty inaccessible and really just wilderness ranching until long after the 1950’s.

We stopped to look at the Murray 1 power station just before Khancoban.  Huge aqueduct pipes bring the water down the mountain to the generating station here.  The Snowy Mountain Scheme is an enormous and impressive feat of engineering involving many tunnels and dams on the watershed of the Snowy Mountains.

We drove out of the park and into the town of Corryong to buy groceries.  The town wasn’t really on our way, and was about a 20 km trip in and back, but it is the only place that we could stock up so that we could spend another week in the snowy mountains.  Somehow we missed the service station on the way out of town although we had seen it on the way in, but we do have enough fuel for a couple hundred more kilometres, so will be ok.

We stopped at the Cabramurra lookout where we refilled our water tank.  Cabramurra is the highest “town” in Australia, though really it seems to be mostly a collection of identical steep roofed buildings designed to keep the snow from collecting on the roof.  It is where the workers live for the nearby Tumut 2 power station.

From here we drove north to the Three Mile Dam camping area.  We are parked on the east side of the lake which seemed to be a little less crowded than the other site.  Unfortunately while picking our site I foolishly backed into a tree and caught the supports for the awning.  Both the front and back supports at the top sheared off.  Since we don’t have a ladder it looked like it would be really difficult to fix.  However I backed up to a sloping tree (carefully this time) and was able to climb the tree and get on the roof.  There I tied up the supports so that they won’t break loose when we drive.  We’ll have to get them fixed somewhere when we go through a larger centre.

After getting set up we walked to see what the rest of the campsite was like.  A man sitting behind his OKA vehicle said we should walk to the viewpoint at the lookout about 1.5 km up the road, so we did that.  There were lots of new varieties of flowers along the way which we haven’t seen before.  It is interesting to walk here.  The air is dry and feels a lot like walking on the prairie, except that there are large Snow Gum eucalyptus trees.  There was a large fire thorugh here in 2003.  We drove through the burned area for much of today.  Parts of where we walked today were also burned over.  The trees are starting to regrow, but there are many charred old eucalyptus trees left.

On the way back Enid and I were commenting that we haven’t seen a lot of snakes.  In fact there have been only a couple before today.  Just after we’d said that we did see a snake on the trail.  It was somewhat over a metre long and slithered very quickly off the path into the grass as soon as it sensed we were there.  There is a small creek leaving the dammed lake, and a family with three boys was there looking for a “Yabbie” in the creek.  Since I didn’t know what that was, I asked the father, who described it to me, and I said, “Oh, you mean a crayfish.”  So now we know what a yabbie is.  He also said that the snake was probably a red-bellied black snake as he’d seen it there the day before.  They are a venomous snake, but usually try to avoid humans.

There was a very nice sunset tonight, and once again the evening is cool.

Washing our motorhome at Geehi

Because it is such a nice site we stayed another day at Geehi.  We’re using the river water to drink (after filtering), to cook and to clean with.  This morning Enid washed clothes and then after that we washed the motorhome.  This took us the entire morning, but it certainly looks much better.

This afternoon I worked on getting the December pictures put into a slideshow, and Enid read.  We also swam/washed in the river, and did some more laundry.  We are almost out of some kinds of food, so we will have to leave tomorrow.

Although it was slightly overcast all day the temperature was very comfortable.  It became quite a bit more windy at suppertime tonight, and the sky cleared somewhat.  It helped to dry the last of the laundry.

There was quite a change of clientele in the campsite today.  A number of our neighbours left and we have a lot of families with children that have moved in.

Looking east from Geehi Wall track

This morning I got up fairly early and shot some video of a few birds and kangaroos.  I got a bit of tape of the kookaburra laughing, and also of some kangaroos.  I wanted to get the kangaroos to jump but they wouldn’t and I was able to walk right up to them and they didn’t move away at all.

After breakfast we made our lunch for a hike on the other side of the river than we did yesterday.  We got away by 9:30 which was good as it was still cool as we walked uphill on the highway for about two kilometers before getting onto the Geehi Walls track.  We then walked downhill back to Bogong Creek where there is an old bridge crossing the river.  Much of the bridge decking is rotting, but several 4 wheel drive vehicles passed us today, and crossed over the bridge.  This track keeps on north to the Geehi Walls, but we went no further than the bridge.  We ate our lunch very close to the spot where Bogong Creek joins the Swampy Plain River.  We returned on the west side of the river after fording it as we had yesterday, a distance today of about 12.5 km.

After we swam Enid washed some of our shirts in the river.  Later on I spoke to a man and woman who also have an older Winnebago motorhome on a Mazda chassis.  It is about two or three years older than ours, and a couple of feet longer.  He loaned me a caravan magazine and Enid and I looked through some of the ads in it to get an idea of what motorhomes similar to ours are selling for.  After supper I took the magazine back and talked to them about places to go and camp both around here and into Victoria.  They gave us some good ideas about camping sites.

Track at Geehi

It was cool and cloudy when we left Jindabyne Lake this morning, but as we drove farther west it became progressively nicer, until it was a beautiful warm day by the time we stopped at 11 am.  The road, called the Alpine Highway, is very narrow and steep.  The highway sign actually says “not recommended for trucks or caravans” but we had little trouble driving it.  However there are many blind curves rated at 15 to 25 km/h, so we travelled quite slowly.  I pulled over several times at pullouts to let faster traffic pass us by.  We also passed many cyclists.  Two large packs of over 25 cyclists each were accompanied by following cars with hazard lights flashing, which certainly was a lot safer for them on this narrow mountain road.

This campsite is large and has room for many camps spread out over a couple of kilometers along the Swampy Plain River.  There are also a number of sites farther downstream along the river but you need a four wheel drive vehicle to get to them as you have to ford the river. 

Despite its name the Swampy Plain River is a beautiful clear fast flowing stream about 30 m wide.  We hiked along it for about 10 km round trip today, starting just after we got here. We went upstream for a few hundred meters from our campsite to where the highway bridges the river and crossed over there, then followed the four wheel drive north.  There are a number of stone buildings along the river that were put in place in the 1940’s for fishing cabins.  Now they are for public day use shelter.  We went into two of them: Keeble’s Hut where we ate lunch seated on a large split log bench, and Old Geehi Hut where the furniture is newer and made out of regular lumber. 

Enid fording Swampy Plain River

To get to the second hut we had to ford the river.  It was a good crossing, mostly smooth stones and they were not at all slippery.  We took off our boots and walked across barefoot, as the water was just over our knees in places.  Both coming and going we met vehicles also fording the river, and on the return trip we also met a man and woman cyclist who had travelled down in ten days from Sydney, and were on their way to Melbourne.  The woman recognised Enid’s accent immediately as Canadian and we discussed the weather here and in Canada at this time of year.

We also forded the river at a second spot on the return walk.  This ford was shallower, but faster.  After getting back to our motorhome we put on our swimming suits and washed off in the clear cool water of the river.  It was very refreshing.

Sumberged trees in Jindabyne Lake

I walked in to the town of Jindabyne this morning, a walk of about 7 km return.  It was a nice warm morning, and several others were on the trail either biking or jogging.  I went to a hardware store and got some cable ties and another water hose.  When I returned I tried raising the level of the water intake tube for our front tank by tying it to a support.  Then I removed it from the tank end, and got thoroughly soaked in the process, as I was lying on my back under the motorhome in order to undo the clamps.  After the intake hose was off we ran water into the tank through the new hose and it worked fine, so I put the hose back on.  When I did so water would no longer run into the tank!  I undid the cable tie so that the intake hose again is sagging, then pushed the water hose far into the tube so that it went past the bend.  That seemed to work the best, so I guess that will have to be the way we fill the second tank.

Late this afternoon we went for a swim in the lake.  The water is very high because of all the rain, so that large trees that normally would be part of campsites right along the water are under at least ten feet of water.  In fact, there are no campsites along the water since they have all been flooded.  The walkway and steps to the water are all flooded, so we walked out about two metres on the steps and were waist deep in water.  We swam back and forth along the shore for a while, but it wasn’t very warm this afternoon so we didn’t stay in the water too long.

Tomorrow we will be heading into camp in Kosciuszko National Park for a couple of days, so we may not have Internet access.

David and Enid at summit of Mt. Kosciuszko

Happy New Year!

We celebrated the start of 2011 by climbing the highest mountain in continental Australia today.  At 2228 m, it’s not really much of a climb, especially given the condition of the trail.  We took the route in from Charlottes Pass, up the old road that climbs very slowy from an initial altitude of 1820 m where we had parked our motorhome almost a kilometre from the actual start of the trail.  There isn’t any real parking area at the trail head so everyone parks along the road.  We found a nice flat spot that we could get our motorhome into along the south side of the road, but we did have to then walk a total of 20 km today, instead of the 18 km that is listed in the guidebooks.

The day was incredibly windy, with gusts that must have approached 50 km/h.  When the man snapped this picture for us, his hat blew off.  Fortunately someone else caught it, or it would have continued on over the side of the mountain.  There was also some rain, though never very much.  We started on the hike wearing our shorts and short sleeved shirts, but when we’d reached the Snowy River it was starting to sprinkle, so we put on our rain jackets.  It wasn’t hot, but it wasn’t really cold either, probably somewhere around 15 C.  However, we met a couple of men who had been in camping overnight as they were hiking out, and one had a scarf over his mouth!  At least they had enough clothing.  We saw several very young children in light tee shirts at the summit of the mountain, and they were obviously cold.  A park ranger gave a couple of them disposable plastic raincoats to wear.  She also talked to us as we met her at the Seaman’s Hut, and she said that the weather was predicting thunderstorms.  “But you look well equipped,” she said.

Seaman’s Hut is a shelter built as a memorial by the parents of a young man who died in a blizzard in August 1928.  We signed the guest register and I commented that it wasn’t very cold compared to what it would be at home in Saskatchewan on January 1.

At Rawston Pass there is another trail that joins the road on which we were walking (this old road was closed in 1976, but park vehicles still use it) and the highest public toilet in Australia.  This other trail is from the top of the chairlift from Thredbo, and by  taking this route you avoid almost the entire climb, minimal though it is, at a cost of about $30 per person.  It still is a 6 km walk in, but it’s almost flat and this is the route most of the people took today, especially the young children, and the unfit (and unfortunately Australians seem to be as fat as Canadians).  A few people hiked in the longer route on the road as we did, though most of them on that route took bicycles.  We did see two families pushing baby strollers up the hill, though we’re not sure how far they got.  One of them at least turned back at Seaman’s Hut; the other’s we don’t know as they were just starting uphill near the start of the trail as we came back.

View from the trail to Mt. Kosciuszko, looking west

Though the wind was miserable, the temperature was actually quite nice for walking.  We wore the legs of our pants on the way down, and didn’t take off our jackets until we were within two kilometres of the trail head.  The morning on the way up was cloudy, but there were breaks in the clouds to the west as we descended, so we got some nice views into the Snowy Mountains from along the track.  There were still a few hanging snow banks in valleys on the south sloping sides of the mountains.  The ground off the trail still has residual snow water or rainfall moisture, as there were many small creeks flowing from the sides of the hills.  The alpine flowers were blooming profusely, so all in all it was a very pleasant walk.

Fields north of Cooma

I had a shower this morning in the motorhome, and part way through the water pump started making strange noises.  I did get the shower finished, and fortunately before I started I’d filled the kettle with water.  It turned out that our water tank was empty, or at least one of the two we have was, as we found out later today.  We could get no water from the tank to wash the dishes, brush our teeth, and so on this morning, but we did have enough in the kettle left from making coffee to wash the dishes.

We stopped in Canberra (at Fyshwick actually) to get some torx wrenches to allow us to remove the hubcaps from the motorhome.  I also got a small metric socket set, and a screen door repair kit, since our screen has a tiny hole near the bottom.  We’d looked up the address for a grocery store here, or so we thought, but it turned out to just be a service station.  After we’d driven around for a while we filled up with diesel, and continued on.  We stopped for lunch north of Cooma, then found a grocery store easily in the town.  Curiously we’d seen a large Winnebago motorhome towing a small jeep while we ate lunch, and he’d honked at us as he drove by on the highway.  It was parked in the lot of the grocery store when we arrived, and they left just before us.  It was so long that the rear end of the motorhome and it’s hitch bottomed out leaving the parking lot.  There was also a motorhome that was almost identical to ours.  It must have been the same age, or very close, as it was on the same Mazda T4600 chassis; however, it’s entry door was at the rear, so it’s kitchen must be laid out differently.

We arrived at the caravan park at Jindabyne in mid-afternoon.  I tried to fill the water tank, and found that the water wouldn’t go in.  We ran the water pump until both tanks were absolutely dry, and still could only fill one of them with water.  There must be something plugging the one entry line.  I opened the underseat storage area on the motorhome to see if I could find anything wrong.  What I did find was that our thermarest pads under there were damp.  I think water may have seeped in from outside.  It wasn’t much but enough that we washed the covers to make sure we killed any mildew.  I also found that the vent hose for the water tank that won’t fill was uncoupled.  That may be where the water got in under the seat, as it was open into the storage area.  I tried to tighten the clamp to reattach it, but it didn’t work very well.  To try and seal it better I coated it with silicone (that had been done before) and then reclamped it.  This might work for a while, but it really needs a different kind of hose and coupling to seal better.  It was good that we opened up the storage area though, as things would have molded badly if they’d stayed wet much longer.  We also found the water bottle holders, which we’ll need tomorrow for our hike, and we’d forgotten where they were.

We talked to our caravan park neighbor while we were trying to repair our water tanks.  It turns out that he is a farmer north of Canberra who raises Angus cattle and sheep.  We learned a bit about farming in Australia from him, including the fact that black Angus cattle are worth a bit more when sold to the feedlots, red Angus and Hereford a bit less.  Part of that is because of the demand for “Angus” beef for the hamburger chains.  However he cynically indicated that the buyers will pay the Angus premium for anything that has a black spot on it.  And as Enid pointed out, once the beef is butchered it would be very difficult to prove that it was Angus beef at all.

Shoalhaven River, Warri reserve

We helped Conrad and Carol pick the vegetables this morning.  At first it was quite cloudy and not too hot, so we had good weather to pick parsley and beans.  We finished by around 11 am, and by then it had started to clear and was getting warmer.  We tidied up the motorhome, and I borrowed Conrad’s ladder to check the roof, since we’ve never been on it.  Everything up there is fine.  We left the farm after lunch.  It was very nice to have been able to be with them at Christmas, but we are also anxious to go on and see other parts of Australia.

We stopped in the town of Braidwood.  It is one of the older towns in Australia, and has a number of historic buildings that have been maintained and in some cases converted to other uses.  We stopped at the grocery store first to get a few of the groceries we’ve run short of – mostly things for breakfast as that’s the only meal we’ve eaten ourselves for the last week.  Then we toured the Anglican church which is very beautiful, and was constructed in 1892.  After that we walked by the old maternity hospital which is now a second hand store and went inside to see what was there.  Following that we walked down the town’s main street which has several other old buildings, including an old Catholic church.  The Catholic church is not as ornate as is the Anglican, but it does have a very large church bell outside.  This bell was originally to have been in a church in Sydney.

We stopped tonight at a free campsite, the Warri Reserve, which is about 16 km west of Braidwood.  It is a large open area under the eucalyptus trees, and on the bank of the Shoalhaven river.  We went for a swim in the river, but the current was strong enough that it was quite hard to swim upstream.  After we’d gone upstream one time Enid walked back and swam downstream again.  When we got to the river one of the men that was there with his young son said that there was a black snake on the other side.  However we didn’t see it (and didn’t want to, as they are very poisonous).

It was hot again this afternoon, probably up in the mid thirties, but now at 8:30 pm the sun has set and it has cooled off very nicely.  The kookaburra’s are laughing raucously right over our motorhome tonight.

Enid and Conrad Kindrachuk walking up hill

Last night it began raining just about dark (8:30 p.m.) and it continued for much of the night.  By morning there had been about 13 mm of rain, so the ground was quite damp.  Enid and I went for a walk with Conrad through the old area south of the road.  There are many old sites from when the area was mined in the 1860’s and later.  You can see piles of tailings that have been sluiced for gold, and the occasional small mine shaft.  There is a graveyard with several depressions in the ground where Chinese miners were buried (but no grave markers).  Along the way we saw a wombat, which is a bit unusual in the daytime.  We were able to get quite close before it dived into its hole.