Three Mile Dam

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.