Guthega Trig

Last weekend was spent at the lodge in Guthega with Andy's work colleagues (many of whom are from overseas). Travelling up after work on Friday night we converged at the Food Factory in Cooma for a bite to eat. We were the first of the group to arrived just after 6pm and were looking forward to some pizza only to be told the pizza oven took 40mins to warm up and the shop closed at 7pm!! What sort of takeaway shop closes by 7pm? Anyway after interrogating the menu again we settled for burgers (adults), toasted sandwiches and hot chips (girls).

Before driving again we changed the girls into their pj's hoping they'd drift off to sleep before we arrived at Guthega. No luck there. With the sun well below the horizon it was kangaroo, wallaby, wombat and rabbit time and boy were they out in force. For those who have been to Guthega before, the last 40km is quite windy road climbing through Kosciuszko National Park, with the last 10km on gravel. I lost count of the number of kangaroos and wallabies. By the end we were up to 6 wombats with 1 deciding to walk right up and around the car after we'd stopped (fantastic for our overseas friends.) The funniest incident though goes to one little rabbit who decided to run in our headlights for about 1km! It would start to head off to one side of the road only to change it's mind and veer to the other side! In the end we stopped and turned our lights off.

Saturday dawned a little foggy, but by the time we had finished breakfast the clouds had lifted and revealed the beautiful mountains. A group discussion on the day's activities suggested two walking options. 1. A 16km hike to Blue Lake (for the hard core group) and B. A hike up Guthega Trig (for the families, pregnant and injured). While the hard core group headed off along the valley towards Illawong and Mt Tywnam (to the left in the panaroma below), we ventured down to the dam. Guthega Trig is the first hilltop to the right of the dam.

At first the walking was easy - downhill and on a nice grass track. However once over the dam, we bush bashed for a little before finding the goat path! It was tough going especially for Katy and Ana who were both about as tall as the heath they were walking through.

After a short while we came across a patch of snow. This provided much relief from the hard yakka. We built a snowman, threw snow balls and had morning tea.

We continued but soon came to the realisation that Katy and Ana were getting very tired and would not make it to the top. So the group split - I ventured down with Katy, Ana and the rest of her family. The little girls made good progress on the way back making it down to the dam before we stopped again this time for lunch.

Meanwhile, Ella, Andy and 7 others headed up. Ella took every opportunity to climb trees and 'ski' on the snow patches. Towards the top, the walking turned to boulder hopping and was a little tricky however, the group reached the trig just in time for lunch!

At the top!

 Looking back to Guthega dam and village

Turns out that the walk is about 6km with 400m climb! An impressive effort especially by all the little people. Needless to say we had a fairly quiet afternoon.

With only a few hours for fun on Sunday, we walked down to Farm Creek. A bridge has been built across the creek since we were last here, with the now historical flying fox still there but locked up.

Time had come to pack up, clean the lodge and head home. We enjoyed showing our visitors the Australian mountains and hope they had as much fun as we did.