In the 19th century, Mt Kosciuszko was approached only by the hardy few, mainly via Crackenback Valley and up the Merritt’s ridge from Friday Flat, or by taking the longer but ‘easier’ route along the West Point track. There were no roads. Today, the road up to the Perisher and Charlotte snowfields partly follows this…
Here’s a great idea: let’s erect a canvas tent and live on the top of Mt Kosciuszko for a year or so. Well, a small band of intrepid individuals did just that at the end of the 19th century. Clement Wragge, a highly regarded meteorologist, gained government funding to establish a weather observatory on top…
With the official start to the ski season imminent and the chance of a good snowfall this week, I thought it a good time to start switching on mentally to the conditions we can expect early season and the hazards that present themselves. Decent early season snowfalls create a lot of enthusiasm and with limited…
Most of us know that our beloved snow is on a downward spiral. We know it because the experts have been telling us this for some time. Organisations like the CSIRO have been releasing studies with findings that report total area covered by snow shrinking by up to 85% by 2050 and the average 112-day…
With limited avalanche terrain, we are lucky to have a relatively safe alpine playground in Australia, but that’s not to say things don’t happen here and that education isn’t necessary. Not wanting to dwell too much on the technical side of snow science, here is an insight into some of the nuances that although usually…
The northern hemisphere ski season has been an epic one with record snow falls in Europe and Japan and enough powder pics on our social feeds in North America to make us Aussies green. But all that snow came with its own challenges and you may have read over the season that America had one…
Jagungal, the most northern of the 2000 metre peaks of the Main Range, is also the most remote and the most difficult to access. In August 1899 a group from the Australian Alpine Club, including the photographer Charles Kerry, achieved the first recorded winter ascent after battling virulent weather conditions. The story of this trip…
Thousands of years after the first ascent of Kosciuszko by the Ngarigo people*, Paul Strzelecki climbed it in 1840, but it was not until August 1897 that the peak received its first recorded visitors in winter. In 1942, Elyne Mitchell published her seminal memoir Australia’s Alps and the following year she received a surprising letter from an…
https://www.alpineaccess.com.au/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Alpine-Access-2020.mp4 2020 – THE COVID SEASON (MUSIC BY TAME IMPALA)
