View down the Buckland River valley on the way to the Twins

Again looking for more interesting activities than skiing in poor spring snow cover whilst my daughter was in a ski programme, I decided to have another shot at The Twins and VE-023 during the bonus season. I activated both these last year and know it was a solid walk given the winter closure of Twins Track. Last year the activation was before any significant snow had fallen, so the ground was quite bare. This year, it was at the end of the season and so snow became a consideration (but as it turned out – minimal). Continue reading →

The summit of VK3/VG-030

On the first weekend in Spring, I found myself once again at Mt Hotham taking my daughter to her regular FreeSki programme. In the preceding few days, Spring had expressed itself in the form of heavy rain which did much damage to the snow cover and so I was only luke-warm about the prospect of skiing. Being in the heart of the mountains, my thoughts of course turned to SOTA. Continue reading →

Mt Buller from the summit of Mt Winstanley

At the end of the Victorian Inter-schools skiing competition week at Mt Buller, I convinced my daughter that it was time to do some cross-country skiing at the neighbouring Mt Stirling resort. We packed up at Mt Buller on Sun morning and headed across to Telephone Box Junction car park on Mt Stirling. There was no sign of snow at the car park, so I had a quick chat to the ski patrollers and they said that it was at least 2km from the carpark to snow and that Mt Winstanley – the target for the day – may not have much snow at all! At that point I decided to leave the skis in the car and hike instead. Continue reading →

Looking towards Family Run from near the summit of Mt Buller

I was up at Mt Buller for the Victorian Inter-schools ski racing where my daughter was competing. Of course I had to escape for a couple of hours to activate it as in previous years!

Access in winter is quite straight forward as the Summit chairlift goes to within a few hundred meters of the summit itself. The last ascent though is fairly hard work in snow conditions wearing ski boots. Continue reading →