Three days and nights on the mountain top was not ALL zen and meditation. As well as being irradiated by the surrounding communications towers, this was also the jump off point for mountain trail bike riders who plunged down a network of capillaries to a car park far below. There wasn’t a lot of whooping to be heard. Suppose it’s hard through gritted teeth and extreme concentration. They were only an occasional arrival and departure, and most had a hapless volunteer who would ferry them back up to the top for another run.
Had a chat with one of the founders of the Snowy River Mountain Tail Bike Club. All the trails are built and maintained by volunteers and is part of a booming network of bike trails throughout the Snowy Mountains. So, don’t feel too sorry for the ski resorts in a bad season. Their business model now runs 10 months a year. When I passed through Thredbo the next day, it was packed. Mountain biking is BIG business.
There was another reason I stayed in Cooma a bit longer. Like Haley’s comet, every so often, I come in from the Oort cloud and orbit one of my children. So my perihelion was Cooma and my son, Sam came down from Canberra for a camp fire breakfast and a catch up. Real QT with my boy. So after he left at about 11, I packed up and headed for the faux snow country (may or may not contain snow). It was, as hoped, a gradual climb, nothing that gave the engine cause for concern. I stopped briefly at Jindabyne for one happy snap and then pushed on to my destination, Smiggins Diggins.
Now I know it’s February and 29 degrees, but for a fleeting second, in the distance I thought I could see a dusting of snow on the distant peaks. It was only as I got closer, that the ‘dusting’ was in fact thousands of dead snow gum trunks pointed toward the sky. That’s the faux snow. The entry fee into the National Park was only $17.00 for a 24 hour pass. The campground hugs the Thredbo River and is clearly signposted into RV and camper sections. Mountain bike chauffeurs would rumble down the dirt road every so often, dislodging riders for another run. But by late afternoon the quiet of the valley triumphed broken only by the tumbling of white water and the occasional grumpy koala.
Up at sparrows the next morning to take some shots and go for a walk to test out the big toe recovery. The sun takes a bit longer to breast the ridges, so for the best part, it was cool and shady along the banks of the Thredbo River.
My intention was to climb to the top of Dead Horse Gap and then drop down to Khancoban in the mid-afternoon. Thredbo Village was chockas, so I didn’t even stop. The chairlifts are modified every spring to accommodate the mountain bikes and riders ,and their trails could been seen crisscrossing the ski runs. The run from Thredbo to Dead Horse gap was mercifully only a few steep kilometres , however the run to down to Khancoban would test out more than the nerves.