Still over 1000 km’s to go. It’s already midnight and apart from trucks we seem to be the only car on the road. Every now and then we drive over whatever remains of a kangaroo, who had an unfortunate encounter with one of the trucks. At some point I have to make a hard stop in order not to hit a wombat, but as the night gets darker the amount of wildlife gets larger, peaking in a situation with literally hundreds of rabbits on the road. By honking almost continuously, we managed not to hit anything and tomorrow we should reach our destination: Mount Kosciuszko.
I’m with my mate Andrew with whom I just spent a week at a conference in Adelaide. We decided, before heading back to The Netherlands, to climb Mount Kozzy and add another of the Seven Summits to our collection. After landing in Melbourne, the trip to Adelaide via the Great Ocean Road was a trip in itself, with plenty of wildlife such koala’s, snakes and funny birds, as well as amazing scenery such as beautiful coast lines and jungles. But more on that some other time perhaps.
While I did bring a climbing pack, Andrew didn’t so in the morning we set of to the ski station and rented his necessary clothes. The person giving him his clothes looked a bit confused as Andrew was wearing shorts and apparently half a meter of snow fell just a night or two ago. “Do you have snowshoes?” he asked us. We both shook our heads. “Well there is a lot of soft snow up there, I’d recommend renting snowshoes as well”. And so we did, and after a nice brunch we headed up the mountain.
The map looked obvious: from the mountain hut, go over the hill, descent and follow the path to Kosciuszko. There were however two problems: clouds had formed behind the hill of the mountain hut, making Kosciuszko completely invisible to us. And two, the large amount of snow that had fallen had completely covered the path, which made the path to Kosciuszko also invisible. “No worries,” I said, “I have the GPS coordinates of the summit so I’ll let my watch navigate us there. Starting the navigation, I could see the summit being several km’s away. Something was wrong…. This climb should be ‘an afternoon stroll’ and cannot be km’s away. I realised soon that the coordinates I took from the ‘Climbing the Seven Summits’ book were in one sort of degrees format whereas my watched used another format, and it made the waypoint useless.
We had a feeling in which direction to go so we started walking anyway, and soon enough we found some parts of the path. This looked good, until the path disappeared entirely and we ended up within a bed of rocks and with no clue where to go. It was freezing and my phone stopped working a while ago; Andrew’s phone had just died as well. We sat down, had a snack and were contemplating going back as wind picked up quite a bit as well.
Then a group of other climbers arrived (out of nowhere). We discussed and agreed on a way to go. The other group clearly had a better sense of the route and that when I realised: they came prepared. We didn’t. I had studied the pictures, had the (be it wrong) summit coordinates, the right clothes etc. But I didn’t study the route well enough. I could have easily studied the route and know it by heart before going up, but I didn’t. And now, with very limited visibility, no navigation, cold temperatures and the wind by now throwing frozen snow: tiny pieces of ice, into our face.
All of a sudden the clouds clear and the Kozzy peak showed itself right next to us: we now knew where to go. From then on, it was an easy hike to the top. A view was missing on the summit; we found a person sitting there, contemplating whether to continue to another mountain or to simply turn back and wait for the dreadful weather to pass. We took some selfies and started heading down, treating ourselves to a drink.
Getting off the mountain by car, we were treated with a little surprise: a field full of kangaroos.
How could we get lost on such a tiny mountain? I clearly had to learn a thing or two on being prepared. While being a small climb, fog and bad weather can still disorient you. A proper study of maps would have helped, a proper route installed on my Suunto watch would have helped: simply being better prepared would have helped. I now always study the route before I climb. And this fantastic trip was a good reminder to do so.
Ciao!
Robin
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