July 29, 2010

This winter in Canberra it’s been cold – properly cold, like I remember it being when I was growing up and we would get those deep frosts that cover everything in white until well into the morning. It’s also rained more than usual. So you might think that up in the Snowy Mountains, only a two hour drive away, there’d be a bumper year of snow and all the ski bums would be going crazy and talking about Aussie Pow. Well, strangely it’s not so – the snow season has sadly been a fizzer so far this year. The call of the snow is strong, though, and last weekend I joined an intrepid gang to go on an overnight backcountry ski trip.

As it turned out, the trip involved entirely perfect weather, great company, nice snow, and a full moon on a clear, bright, sparkly, and utterly chilly night. We skied from Thredbo top station out towards Mt Kosciuszko (it bemuses me how you’d never know it’s our highest peak by looking at its unimpressive, rounded outline), dropped into the Cootapatamba valley, then skied to the summit and back down. For July the snow was incredibly thin, but there was definitely enough to ski on if you kept an eye out for rocks, and more than enough to make the surrounding hills quite spectacular. At night the full moon was bright enough that we cast shadows and didn’t need headlamps to walk around. The air in the valley was totally still, and it was just awesome to wake up in such a beautiful part of the world.