The Victorian High Country in Winter

After leaving Switzerland and completing my Nepal/India trip, I was back in Australia for about six weeks over winter before I had to head to San Francisco for business school.  I took the chance to do something I always wanted to do and planned a week snow shoeing and camping up in the Australian Alps with my mate Adam.

The area we chose was near the start of the Australian Alps Walking Track east of Melbourne.  Initially we wanted to hike 11km to Mt. St. Phillack, but we found the snow a lot softer and deeper than we expected and only made it a moderate distance past Mt. Erica instead (about 6-7km from our start point).  We also under-estimated the difficulty in navigating in the high country – it’s extremely featureless without any prominent peaks or streams, and the track markers on the trees are often obscured by snow.

    
The different vegetations of the high country.  (L) I love the colour of the snow gums!  (R) Birch trees and tree ferns lower down the mountain.

Crossing one of the plains.

The beautiful textures and colours of snow gum bark.

Home Sweet Home for a night…

The next morning. The weather had turned foul with snow blizzards blowing across the plain throughout the night, and we were forced to walk out in near white-out conditions the next morning.