Wednesday, April 11th, 2012: The Alpine Way and the Snowy Mountains
Bob: Having decided to continue tracking the course of the Murray River upstream, we started off eastward from Corryong right after breakfast. We crossed the river just a few kilometers down the road and stopped to take pictures. The water was perfectly clear at that point, which was understandable as the river was just exiting the high country to the East. We saw evidence of the spring floods, however, in the jam of trees that had been carried downstream and were currently lodged against the piers of the bridge. |
Monika: Last time we were in this area, we drove into the mountains from the East, but did not make it much past the eastern entrance to the National Park because of low lying fog and icy roads on the higher sections. This time we hoped to make it to Thredbo, a little town in the middle of the Alps. Of course, we started out following the Murray River and at the first bridge stopped for some pictures of the upper Murray. |
Bob: Just down the road from the crossing at Khancoban we picked up the Alpine Way, a beautiful road cut through the mountains in the 1970s when the Australian government built the huge Snowy River hydroelectric complex. The road twisted and turned along the side of the mountains and through narrow cuts, much in the way the Skyline Drive has been built on the top of the Blue Ridge Mountains back in Virginia. |
Monika: From the Murray we followed the Alpine Way, a road cut through the mountains. After the first few miles, I again spotted a kangaroo, and we took a picture of a little one sitting by the side of the road. Besides the Alpine Road, the other great engineering achievement in these mountains is the Snowy Mountains water management project. It was an enormous undertaking, channeling water from the lakes on the east side of the mountains through tunnels to hydroelectric plants on the west side of the mountains which discharge the water into the Murray River, where it is used to irrigate the thousands of vineyards and orchards along the Murray River basin. We had seen pictures and models of this project in Cooma on our previous visit and marvelled at this. This time we stopped at one of the overlooks and saw the pipes coming down into one of the hydroelectric plants. |
Bob: We followed the Alpine Way southwards to Scammell's Ridge Lookout where we had a great view of the mountains from a platform that was built out over the lower trees on the side of the mountain. It was built that way for Queen Elizabeth's visit in the 1970s, I gather, but since trees had not yet grown up in front of the platform we had a unobstructed panorama of the peaks of the Great Dividing Range looming ahead of us. |
Monika: Our next stop was a lookout, that showed us some of the higher peaks of the Alps. |
Bob: Our road took a sharp bend to the East at Tom Groggin's Camping Area, so we pulled in there to take one last look at the Mighty Murray. It still looked big enough to maybe float a kayak or canoe, but clearly we were getting near the headwaters of the Murray a little farther up in the mountains. The waters were not that cold, surprisingly, a fact we accidentally found out when I pushed Monika into the river while trying to position her for a tripod shot. You see, after I set the timer on the camera, we have exactly 12 seconds before it takes the picture, so I have to rush over and join Monika, smile sweetly, and wait for the flash to indicate the picture has been taken. In this case Monika was on a rock in the middle of the stream, and when I rushed out to join her I pushed her over to one side to be sure we would both be in the picture frame. Of course, that pushed her right off the rock into the stream and we narrowly avoided the dual catastrophe of her going down and taking me with into the stream. As it was, we both managed to remain standing, although we were in the stream rather than on the rock. I quickly jumped back, pulled Monika back up on the rock, and we both looked at the camera and smiled sweetly just as the flash went off. Unless somebody knows to look at the bottom of our pants, they will never see that Monika's shoes are soaking wet! |
Monika: At the Tom Groggin's area we were again next to the Murray river, and I got closer to it than I wanted. We had wandered down to the river and Bob wanted to take one of his patented "we were here" pictures courtesy of the little tripod he always carries. I arranged myself on a rock in the river and Bob set up the camera. When he joined me, he decided I should move over just a little bit and shoved me. Since I was already at the edge of the rock, I stepped into the water and got wet feet. Bob pulled me back up onto the rock just in time for the picture, none the worse for wear, except for wet feet, of course. |
Bob: Fortunately, Monika had spare dry socks in the car, so she changed into those and we continued on the Alpine Way eastward up and over the mountains to Thredbo, stopping off for the view at Dead Horse Gap a few kilometers uphill from Thredbo. I wanted to get back to Thredbo as that is where we turned around when we visited the eastern side of the Australian Alps during our last visit to Australia (Wanderung 20). It had been raining and foggy at the upper altitudes that day, so we had taken a walk in the lowlands rather than paying the entrance fee and driving into the high country. But this time we were much more fortunate with the weather. Although it was noticeably cooler in the mountains and in Thredbo than down in Corryong, it was still sunny and comfortable if I wore a sweater. We parked at the edge of the town and walked in, hoping to find a place to eat lunch. Well, we found one place that only served Chinese dishes, and a couple of cafes or bistros that were charging about 100% more than what we were used to paying for lunches. That put us off, rather, and when we remembered that back in the hotel room we had bread, meat, cheese, Coke, beer, and pretty much everything we needed to make a great lunch, we decided to just pack it in and head back to Corryong for a late lunch. |
Monika: Luckily, I had dry socks on the car, so i put those on, although my pant legs and shoes remained wet. We continued up to the Continental Divide at Dead Horse Gap, and noticed that up there it had gotten a lot colder and there was actual snow on the ground. A little farther on you could actually see where the ski runs would be in the winter. Thredbo was a typical resort town with overpriced food. We walked around and tried to find a reasonable place for lunch. But either the places we found were closed (after all it was before tourist season), or if it was open then it was way over priced from what we had budgeted. So we just kept taking in the sights and decided to go back to Corryong where we had food in our motel room. |
Bob: We did however, pay the $17 entrance fee for the National Park, so at least I felt legal while driving back to Corryong. Lunch was just as good as I had imagined it would be, and it was just as well we were consuming all the odds and ends of food we had picked up along the way, as we would just have to discard our leftovers when boarding the cruise ship in a couple days. | Monika: Driving an interesting scenic road in reverse always seems to give you a different view on the road and the landscape. The road, at times, was cut way into the side of the mountain with the reddish-yellow rock shining in the sun. Taking pictures while driving was not easy. Back at our place, we had a quick lunch of our remaining staples, since after today, we would be with friends before boarding the cruise ship, so we would not need anymore food. |
Bob: After lunch we once again had some energy so I drove the short distance into town where we thought the library would be and we parked to see if we could get internet access. Like many Australian libraries, the Corryong library did in fact offer both free computer terminals and free WiFi internet access. I used our netbook to log on while Monika used one of the library computers, and that way we both just managed to check and answer our emails and check in with Facebook before the library closed for the day. Afterwards we walked up and down the main commercial street, and I thought it was a very nice, friendly little town. Besides the library it had a bank, real estate companies, a bar, a bakery, a cafe, a hotel, a second-hand shop, a grocery store, a farm supply store, a sporting goods store, and a couple of antique shops. That covers most of the basics, don't you think? Everything pretty much closed up for the day at 5:00 p.m., however, so shortly after that we drove back to our hotel room for the evening. |
Monika: After lunch we decided to walk into the sleepy little town past a statue to the Man from Snowy River to the library. The library had internet, so we could catch up with e-mail and facebook. But it as well as everything else closed at 5:PM. So we just ambled home, enjoying a rosella that was perched on the eave of a house. |
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