| Gales and gear malfunction enhance the bonding experience of a high-country trek by Dugald Jellie and his mates. A cold wind blows hard through the saddle. It slaps against the tent, whipping under the fly. My feet are frozen. Spring snow glistens outside under quicksilver moonlight. I toss and turn. Gusts lift the groundsheet. I hope the pegs on the windward side hold firm.
Four of us are camped by Mount Kosciuszko. We had skied with full packs along a northern spur of the country's highest peak, hoping to drop down by Albina Lake for the night. But in fading light we opt instead for flat ground on Muellers Pass, near a fingertip of Snowy River headwater.
The weather is benign. Our spirits are high. We swig mouthfuls of whisky and congratulate ourselves for being here.
It's our boys' own adventure: three days out in the back country. We planned it by email; lists were posted, work schedules shifted. We are leaving behind our everyday lives to walk into the mountains and ski the last of the snows on south-facing slopes in the heart of Kosciuszko. We will be unwashed. Our whiskers will grow. We will read maps and talk about women. In our private ways we will be at one with the sky, the ice, the wind, the land, the mountains, with a stick of salami, with ourselves.
Among alpine lakes we seek the sublime in nature. We also seek a few of the season's last downhill runs. On this ancient plateau chiselled smooth by rock and ice, we hope to traverse the only relics of glaciation on mainland Australia, on the only terrain above 2000 metres in the land. And we come with a book, Wildflowers Of The Snow Country, a field guide illustrated with watercolours. In the spring snow melt, we hope to identify the first daisies and alpine orchids of the season.
But now, on Saturday night, we camp on an exposed lip of the Great Dividing Range and as night falls the wind lifts. At first it's a cool up-valley caress across the lake below, ice-crusted and skirted by snow. We rug up and cook in the lee of the tent.
The breeze stiffens. By bedtime it is incessant. We double-check guy ropes and zip ourselves into tents already flapping. It comes in from the west, a nameless wind crossing Riverina flatlands, whistling over Swan Hill, Deniliquin, Tocumwal, following the Murray upstream over border towns, rooftops, treetops, to Corryong, where it turns and guns up the Geehi River.
Here it hits the sharp west wall of the Snowy Mountains where we have camped, on a high pass in a little tent on the open side of Kosciuszko. The moon is full, stars wink and the dry wind blows hard. There are two of us in the tent. We could not have known in the dead of night this scudding wind would knock us flat.
MOUNT KOSCIUSZKO is a geographical footnote, a round-topped molehill when measured against great peaks of the world but rising 2228 metres nevertheless. In the ballads of Banjo Paterson, the Silver Brumby stories of Elaine Mitchell, the muscular bravado of Snowy Mountains hydro workers, this mountain is etched in the national sentiment.
Count Paul Edmund de Strzelecki put it on the map on a clear summer's day in 1840, when he hauled a mercury barometer on his back to this highest point. An exiled Polish journeyman, he was a man of flamboyant exploits, travelling the world on his wit, polished charm and the good fortune of a title, albeit of uncertain claim.
His wanderings across Australia and geological observations are remembered still in toponyms: the Strzelecki Ranges in South Gippsland, South Australia's Strzelecki Desert and Strzelecki Peak on Flinders Island, the highest point in Bass Strait. On this journey he walked alone, observing a "pinnacle, rocky and naked, predominant over several others". It was late in the day. He was 43 years old. A snowdrift lay to the south. He had found the top of the continental landmass.
The adventurer, who later received a British knighthood for his achievements, dedicated the summit to his fellow countryman, patriot Tadeusz Kosciuszko. He wrote of its everlasting snows, the silence and dignity with which it is surrounded. He ruled it off at 6510ft (1986m), though for years to come no one could be sure of its true elevation, whereabouts or correct spelling (the "z" was added by the Geographical Names Board of NSW 10 years ago).
This barren high country was protected first in 1906, with 100 square miles (259 sq km) around the summit gazetted as the Snowy Mountains National Chase for "public recreation and the preservation of game".
A road to the top was cut between 1908 and 1909. Later, the Hotel Kosciusko, built by the NSW Tourist Bureau, promoted the middle-class virtues of alpine recreation. Only Mount Buffalo in north-east Victoria has a longer legacy of high-country tourism. The Bright Progress and Alpine Club organised trips, scenic guidebooks and in 1898 lobbied successfully to have the granite plateau reserved as a national park.
It was an era of national patriotism, of alpine wanderlust, of outdoor recreation, of romantic naturalism based on the ideas of Rousseau. Henry Thoreau later summed up the prevailing sentiment: In Wilderness is the preservation of the World.
Our boys' weekend follows this tradition of rugged individualism: of a man and a mountain and a skivvy and striped thermal underwear. All of us are in our 30s, one married, others with partners, some leaving children behind, all with white-collar jobs and soft hands that get dirty only when running out the bins or changing a nappy.
Now we strike for the mountains with head lamps and tins of sardines. Alpine touring skis and boots are clipped to our packs, an additional 10 kilos to carry.
We will venture beyond mobile-phone range. We pack plastic bags and empty tennis-ball tins to carry out our excrement. We fart into the wind.
"I've got a healthy stench already," says Cam, as we rest by running meltwater in the Snowy, on a bend thick with curved ice cracked into little bergs.
Cam's neck is noosed by a waterproof map sleeve. For weeks he had the chart pinned to the back of his toilet door. His girlfriend disapproved. He says he told her it was critical he know his whereabouts in the backwoods. He told her he needed to study the topography, alone and undisturbed.
Contours from Charlotte Pass rise up to Etheridge Ridge. On the path we pass mountain bikers, holidaying families, the young and old, Germans and Swiss, single hikers and couples walking hand-in-hand. About 30,000 make the trek to Kosciuszko each year.
Beyond Rawson Pass we clip on skis and traverse the eastern flank of the mountain, above the tree line. It feels good not to carry the extra weight. We hook skins onto the underside of our skis and step up Muellers Peak. After one long downhill run we climb down a cornice and make camp for the night in pomegranate light.
ABORIGINES say if you sleep in the land it talks to you, its spirits sing, and for local tribes this was true of Muniong, the "big white mountain" with its rich seasonal harvest of fatty bogong moths. We see them now with other insects, dead and frozen on snow drifts tinted ochre from windblown earth.
But it's not the land that sings tonight, it's the tent. Zipper pulls chime in a chorus with the flapping fly. I am thankful to have packed earplugs.
I share the tent with Mike, who turns 40 next month and is snuggled in his down bag. He makes himself comfortable. He suggests we push our sleeping mats together to keep warm. He offers an emergency bivouac bag to cover my toes, chilled by the draught. I fall asleep cocooned in a big orange plastic bag.
Soon I awake to the sound of wind and the sight of the doorway pushed in on us. We have gear malfunction. The structure has collapsed, the poles are bent.
I wake Mike and suggest swivelling the tent so the low end points into the wind. He says it's punching too hard and thinks if we unclip the hooks we may lose everything.
Then the full velocity whacks us. Nylon flaps all around. There's nothing to do but ride it out with poles and ropes and fabric snapping over us until daybreak. I hardly sleep a wink. I remind myself never again to pitch camp in a saddle.
GERMAN-BORN Baron Ferdinand von Mueller was appointed Victoria's first botanist in 1853, whereupon he made several expeditions into the high country, named Mount Hotham, collected specimens and identified hundreds of plant species. We awake in his namesake pass, break camp and brew black coffee in a ditch on the lee of the mountain. The howling wind has not abated.
Leaving packs and skis on the pass, we continue unencumbered along the Main Range track to Blue Lake, hoping to see cirque and tarn lakes formed by glaciation, and lumpy moraines - the rasped landscape left from the last ice age. We hope also to see the first of the spring wildflowers. We tiptoe over sheets of snow. We're knocked sideways on a ridge above Club Lake. In gale-force winds we cross stony pavements of yellow flowering feldmark buttercups, the rarest alpine plant community in Australia.
The feldmark, pruned by scything westerlies, covers only 30 hectares of the plateau, with endemic dwarf shrubs, cushion grasses and herbfields. It clings to a wind-blasted saddle between Carruthers Peak and Mount Lee where it's too bleak even for snow to settle.
Dirty weather settles in. Ice needles skittle horizontal. We backtrack, returning to Kosciuszko in the afternoon on skis and then trudging to the shelter of Seamans Hut.
Here we gulp drams of whisky, sip hot chocolate and share the good fortune of being out of the cold. We fry cuts of eye fillet on the potbelly stove. We tell clipped stories of our fathers, smoke rolled tobacco, sleep on the hardwood floor. Our pleasures are primitive.
The stone hut is a memorial shelter built for an American, Laurie Seaman, who, with his companion Evan Hayes, died hereabouts in a blizzard on August 13, 1928. There's a plaque commemorating four young Sydney men who in August 1999 set out on a three-day snowboarding trek. Their bodies were found in the spring thaw in late November. They had died during the night in a snow cave.
Snowflakes swirl and flitter on the morning we walk out. A low-pressure system moves in from the south; clouds gather and the barometer drops. It is about to dump. We cannot believe our misfortune. Here is a chance to cross-country ski on fresh November snow but instead we must return to commitments in the city.
On the drive home I open the botanical field guide to the Australian Alps. In the introduction, under a sub-heading on habitats, it reads: The alpine meadows blaze with colour from early December to late February. I didn't know this. We had entered the mountains a few weeks too early.
FAST FACTS
Getting there. Mount Kosciuszko is in the far south of its namesake national park, the largest in NSW, near the headwater of the Murray River and the Victorian border. It takes about six hours to drive from Sydney to Jindabyne and eight hours from Melbourne. The park is most easily accessed via the Snowy Mountains Highway and Jindabyne, or from Corryong and Khancoban, through Tom Groggin on the Alpine Way. Both roads are sealed. The summit is a 16km return walk from Charlotte Pass, or 12km return from the top of Eagles Nest chairlift at Thredbo. Park day passes for vehicles cost $16 in summer.
The nearest regional airport to Jindabyne is Cooma; Hazelton Airlines has a seasonal service from Sydney to Cooma, flights from $166. The nearest major airport is Canberra. Virgin Blue has fares from Sydney and Melbourne to Canberra from $99; Qantas has fares from $115 to Melbourne and $110 to Sydney. (All fares are one way and include tax.)
Walking there. Alpine wildflowers bloom from early December to late February, coinciding with the peak walking season. The mean top temperature at Charlotte Pass in December is 15.5 degrees, with a low of 3.7 degrees. January is the warmest month, with a mean max of 17.4 degrees. Be prepared for all seasons; the mountains do have the odd white Christmas.
For information on walks see[] www.nationalparks.nsw.gov.au
or contact the Snowy Region Visitor Centre at Jindabyne, open daily 8.30am-5pm, phone 6450 5600. The Australian Alps National Parks website www.australianalps.deh.gov.au has details on the 665km Alpine Walking Track, traversing the Great Dividing Range from Walhalla in Victoria to Canberra.
Guided Kosciuszko summit walks depart from Thredbo ($35/$21, includes chairlift, Sat-Sun, Tue and Thu, bookings required, http://www.thredbo.com.au, with sunrise tours on Sundays). Kosciuszko Alpine Guided Walks also run trips from Lake Crackenback Resort at Jindabyne, phone 6451 3600 or see www.novotellakecrackenback.com.au/walks The annual Thredbo Blues Festival is on January 11-13.
For information on the Victorian High Country see www.visitalpine.com or click on the Alpine National Park link on www.parkweb.vic.gov.au Remember to tread softly and if you're camping, in the interests of ecological travel, take plastic bags and a container with a secure lid to carry out your waste.
From Brisbane Times | 
