Kosciuszko from Ngarigo Campground
1–2 February 2023
I’ve been building up to returning to Kosciuszko National Park for years for the first time since I was a kid and came here with my parents. Getting ready to come here meant overnight camping which I’ve only started doing recently, which is quite different from day hikes in terms of planning, equipment etc.
My first couple of solo camping trips in late 2022 didn’t go great. The first one at Mount Clear Campground in Namadgi National Park I found my 1P tent I had purchased several years earlier and hadn’t used was too small, the sleeping bag uncomfortable, and I didn’t sleep well.
So for my next solo camping trip I upgraded to a 2P Coleman Instant Swagger at a cotton swag bag from AOS which was much more comfortable but I chose a poor site and got flooded, and that was on the second night after Channel-billed cuckoos kept me up.
How did my third solo camping at Ngarigo Campground go?
Well, we had a severe weather warning with 100 km/h winds up on the Main Range on the second day which while calmer down in the valley still managed to break my tent. Technically, the wind pushed down the tent so the cross bars popped out of their sockets and poked holes in the fly.
Yeah, so I aborted this camping trip too and went home early. Maybe next time will go smoothly? Or maybe this is just camping life.
Apart from the camping it was an … experience. I went up the chairlift to go for a walk but due to the wind conditions it was freezing cold up the top and I didn’t want to have to walk back down via _____ if they closed the chairlift due to the wind, so I went back down and drove around to Charlotte Pass.
I also tried my hand at fishing in _____ River, but that didn’t go well because of the rocky riverbed and I lose a few lures and things before giving up on that too. I was upset about leaving crap behind in the beautiful river and still want to go back and clean it up because I’m not ok with that. And no fish. The trout were jumping though! I think I’ll need to switch to fly fishing sooner rather than later if that’s something I want to do.
Thankfully the weather was great on the day I arrived, and I didn’t squander it, heading a few kilometres down the Cascade Trail opposite Dead Horse Gap.
After the walk I tried my hand at trout fishing with my spin rod but had no idea what I was doing and lost a few lures and things which made me cranky. I think I’ll have to take up fly fishing if I want to fish small rivers like this.
That night I cooked up a steak and some vegies on the massive 500mm OZ Braai grill grid.
The next morning I drove to Thredbo and got my ticket for the chairlift. The chairlift seems to go on forever and it’s incredible the change in landscape from the valley up to the top.
It was brutally cold and windy up the top. They had warned me they’d be closing the chairlift because of the severe weather warning and if I didn’t make it back down in time I’d have to walk back via Dead Horse Gap.
Fuck that. I stayed up top for about five minutes then came straight back down. I was not prepared or equipped for that.
So change of plan, in the car, and around to Charlotte Pass. No less windy but at least no chairlifts to strand me.
There’s a very short boardwalk at Charlotte Pass with stunning Snow Gums, a subspecies restricted to just that area.
After spending a bit of time I decided to descend down to somewhere less windy and go for a decent walk at Rainbow Lake.
Found a beautiful small Highlands Copperhead near the rocks. I was quite close when I saw it behind a tussock but it was snake habitat and I was expecting to see one there. It froze until I stepped backwards and then it quickly whipped around and dove for cover in the grass.
As I headed back to my campsite I swung by the Thredbo Diggings campground and signs weren’t good. Everyone was struggling to pack up their tents, and no one had time to take care of the gazebo that had blown onto the road.
Once I got back to my campground that had been deserted by all the tent campers and saw the damage to my tent I decided to call it quits and head back to Canberra.
