Summer Snow

Last week, I experienced snow for the third time since leaving home.

Last week, one of my girls experienced snow for the first time in her life.

The alpine is fickle here: fed by a tempermental, unpredictable clash of systems, weather can change on a dime no matter what time of year. Those days of looking at a Mt. Hood forecast for five days’ sun and leaving behind the tent fly? Yeah, that’s not gonna fly here. (No pun intended.)

I first visit the alpine in September, skipping town with my Kiwi housemate for a few days during school break. In our back yard as the crow flies, Alpine National Park takes several hours to reach from Eildon by car.

Our road chosen path twists six hours over ghostlike ridges, blanketed in gums’ burnt skeletons rising over a decade’s new dense green growth. Shade-dappled roads change color almost by the minute depending on mineral content: from red, to white, to purple, to brown, to gray. The trip proves a basic lesson in four wheel driving, with Grace in the instructor’s seat: really, aside from the wheels and the dirt underfoot, it all somehow comes down to the basics of ski racing.

The track into Crosscut rises gently through sodden bogs into remnants of winter snow fields, through snow gum forests filled with twisted limbs and trunks, bark spattered and sprayed in strips of color. We emerge from the trees to high, grassy heathland, surrounded by sheer, sweeping ridges and spurs, the highest capped and dusted with snow in the distance. Everything fades to blue: layer upon layer upon layer of blue. Crosscut shoots out in front of us as a jagged spur rising in pride from the surrounding world as we arrive at to the top of Mt. Howitt, just in time for the sun to hit the horizon.

The sun sets and fog rolls in. When I turn around from brushing my teeth, our tent has all but disappeared. After winds batter our cozy tent hard enough through the night they actually manage to roll me over in my sleep, we wake to a whiteout and half an inch of snow on the ground.

Because, ya know, the second week of September in Australia doesn’t exactly constitute late summer.

We proceed to hike Crosscut through snow and rain and fog to Mt. Buggery, before turning back in lieu of continuing through Horrible Gab, and as we head back out to the car fog clears to reveal a pure white winter wonderland.

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My second alpine experience takes me to a place called Lake Mountain with a group of teenagers accompanied by all the usual antics: one group of boys gets a classic lesson in natural consequences after they arrive at camp and realize they managed to pack their tent back into the trailer instead of into their packs. Whelp, I guess y’all are tarping it tonight. Good luck finding a dry spot away from trees in the foggy, murky bog.

Because the alpine here is a bit different than at home, where rainfall and snowmelt simply run off the hill into streams and rivers, as you would expect a proper mountain to behave. Here in the Aussie Alpine, rolling hills and heathland simply catch rainfall and melting snow, creating boggy, ankle-deep mazes as the water table rises and oversaturates the land for miles in every direction.

We hike through towering ghost forests of Mountain Ash to sweeping vistas of the alpine, still overwrought with desolation from that firestorm ten years or so ago commonly known as Black Saturday. We bust our butts off ridges as the wind picks up, trees clattering and clashing above our heads.

__________

My last program of the season takes me back to the alpine one last time, to a region Falls Creek stepped in history and scattered with huts formerly used by cattlemen to weather storms. We camp our first night by a glassy lake, cooking amongst gneiss boulders split by winter ice, worn to smooth orbs and stacked atop each other my wind and rain.

My self-catering girls arrive with deli sack filled with meat patties, which they proceed to carry in and fry on trangia pans for their first evening’s dinner. Through the next three days, sacks of potatos, whole cauliflour, iceberg lettuce, corn on the cob, salami, cucumbers and tomatoes all emerge from their packs by the armful.

”So, why do you think your packs were so heavy?”
"...The stuff we put in it.”

‘Nough said.

Wildflowers light the slopes in blazes of purple and yellow as we pick our way around the lake to our second night’s rest, as the girls learn to pick their way through bogs (Two Towers, anyone?) and discover the most direct route isn’t always the fastest.

Driving rain and winds arrive the next day, and we fight from being blown off our path as we work toward the refuge of stout little Langford hut. After addressing a door blown off its top hinges with bit of creativity and brute strength, we fit into the hut like tetras pieces for the night as wind howls down the heavy ancient woodstove, blowing rain horizontally across the room from where it’s caught on the unsealed doorframe.

We wake to snow showers as the storm clears, and I bask in the crisp bite of a clear November day. Except it’s high summer here, in theory, and I’ve also woken to a message form home announcing Portland’s yearly frigid, city-derailing ice storm.

Half way around the world, it all still somehow manages to feel like home.