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With no break in the weather, our boys really had their work cut out for them. Here's Part Two of the High Country Adventure.
Words by Jonh Rooth
Photography by Robb Cox
The cabins behind the Dargo Hotel are built from solid, foot-thick logs crisscrossed at the corners in the American fashion. Those pioneer Yankees chose this building method for a couple of reasons - they had plenty of straight timber and the cabins had to be grizzly-bear proof. Damned good thing they built 'em solid in Dargo too, even if the nearest thing we had to a grizzly was me in my underpants. Why's that? Well after walloping down three courses of Gangle's brilliant tucker with a heap of rum the night before, there were some awesome eruptions of the almost-a-log kind during the night. Damo emerged from a shared room gagging for breath and Coxy was clawing the walls, leaving Lowmount wafting his sheets and giggling.
Ah, the pleasures of sharing a room! But one look outside proved we'd have been drenched anywhere else. The world down Victoria way was as wet as it comes. There was an unnaturally cold wind blowing too, of the type that'd freeze the walnuts of a Dargo tree. So we trudged over to the pub for a beaut, cooked breakfast - thanks, Jodie, you kept us going all day! - and heard the news. Despite being high summer in the High Country, they had over a metre's worth of snow around Mount Hotham overnight. The thought of plunging mud tyres through virgin snow, of tracks reduced to a quagmire, of Christmas scenes, snowball fights and swapping cogs up treacherous tracks all proved too much for Editor Pat. He opened up his itinerary and chucked the next page in the bin.
"Right, lads, we're heading back to Hotham. I wouldn't miss this for all the lockers in Kilsyth! Bung yer furry underdacks on, grease up yer boots and we're off!" And with that, Pat loaded up another piece of toast with bacon and egg and pushed it past his grin. Now, this was brave stuff, because Pat's Otis has about as much weatherproofing as your average jet ski. There is no heater, no demister, plenty of gaps in the floor - just like Milo come to think of it. No wonder there was a queue for the Patrol and the Prado. If there's a huge difference between playing with old trucks and new ones, it's the comfort factor, and it takes the extremes of Australia's climate to plumb those depths. I've roasted across gibber plains out west while the turbo was peeling the paint off the firewall, but nothing prepared me for that first taste of a High Country snow-blown blizzard. And this was summer?
So, we poked back down the High Plains Road that runs up the south end of the Alpine National Park and the aptly named Mount Freezeout. Well-graded clay base it might be, but the rain overnight had turned it to a greasy, slush-ridden series of boggy straights and slippery corners. I broke the Stauns out and dropped Milo's STTs to 16psi, trying hard to remember a Fraser Island beach in summer as the first drops of ice slipped down the back of my jacket. It worked though, as well as you'd expect. With the STTs bagging out, traction was more predictable and the slides slowed down. But as anyone who's driven the High Country slush knows, you don't take traction for granted.
During one slow haul up a not-so-steep hill, I was amazed to find old Milo taking the path of least resistance and almost sliding off the road. Phew, good thing there was a white-out on and a bloke couldn't see the drop off the side of the road. Somewhere past the Little Woman's Grave, we turned off the road to take an unmarked track through the bush. The snow was a foot deep in places and hiding little puddles of frozen water about everywhere a bloke put his boot. So, naturally, we stopped to take some photos. Within minutes, Pat had lobbed an armful of snow at Ant, and it was on. Lowmount tackled Damo with a fistful, and I looked around for somewhere to hide. Good grief, what a way to warm up! Wet through and dripping, we climbed back in the trucks. Have you ever noticed how canvas seat covers puddle up around the cods? I have, all day. But we won't go there. I will note that the windows went straight up on both the Patrol and Prado, and you could hear the roaring of overworked heater pumps. What I won't say is 'nyah, nyah, yer as soft as warm butter. I hope your seat warmers short out and fry your goolies!'. No, I'll just think that. Back on the High Plains road, it wasn't long before Ant signalled a left and we plunged off to tackle the Blue Rag Track.
This is where the Watts and Cox team came into their own, capturing some of the most awesome imagery as our convoy of trucks ploughed through the tree-lined mist. You could hear motors roaring long before a truck would poke out of the clouds, spewing mud and slush from its STTs like Fat Kevvy after an overdose on the prawns at the Septemberfest. More than once, the track surface was glazed over by frozen puddles, but nobody was game to walk the slush. We drove it, trusting that none of the puddles would swallow a truck as long as we kept to the tracks, and we stuck Pat out front with his 37s to find out first! Somewhere along there, I heard a ringing noise from the overhead pocket. Somehow, in the whirling mist as we traversed what must have been a crest, we'd lobbed into a pocket of mobile-phone range. It was the Handbrake, calling to tell me they were in the middle of a heatwave in Brisbane and the evaporative cooler I'd bludged off Long Bruce had sprung a leak.
She was just telling me about the watermark on the wall and how I'd have to paint the house, when the phone dropped out and Milo plunged through another puddle. Gee, must have hit the 'off' button with the gearstick, huh? We were a long way from any heatwave. The snow got thicker the higher we climbed - something High Country regulars know all about - and before long even Pat had had enough. We turned back and slid down the slopes we'd worked so hard to slide up. Back on the road, and things hadn't improved, even if it'd stopped raining for a while. There'd been a bit more traffic through by the look of things, and up here every car churns its share of mud until the roads turn to absolute slush. You've got it, it was incredible fun! Especially when we got back to Dargo in time for a late dinner and a couple of hundred medicinal rums. That night, the logs in those cabins almost slipped out of their slots as the great '4WD Snore-athon' hit high gear. Some of those lads were cheating too, snoring from both ends definitely isn't in the rules!
An early start to take advantage of the sunlight (old Victorian term meaning 'it isn't raining yet'), and after fuelling up at the store, we doubled back down the sealed road to Grant Junction before turning off to Talbotville. This is old gold country - a place where people flooded in and towns grew overnight less than 150 years ago. We stopped to look at the headstones at Grant Cemetery - looked after by the Overlanders 4X4 Club - and pondered the fate of those brave pioneers who rode and walked these pre-grader tracks. At least they didn't have overactive citified greenies to deal with. As an old miner, I know a bit about reclaiming the land and the laws that now apply in these environmentally conscious days. However, the people who think a row of logs or a fence is the answer, the dunderheads who believe restricting access will cure the world's problems, wow, they should just get out and have a look themselves.
I could imagine the huge impact old-style deep-shaft mining must have had on the landscape around Grant, but buggered if there was much more than a signpost to tell the story now. Why? Because Mother Nature always wins in the end. A year is enough to cover a track; a decade and you'll lose house foundations; a hundred years and there's a paddock where a town used to be. Even big mines and their dumps blend back to earth so quickly in the geological scheme of things. That's why stopping four-wheel drivers from accessing their own country is a crime against nature as far as I'm concerned. There's no rationale for it, not in the real world. Just greedy, little, interfering, office-bound twats who wouldn't know a rock from a wallaby if it punched them in the nose, but who take great pleasure in playing bush Nazis (No bush for you!) and telling the rest of us what we can or cannot do. I'd like to bung them all in a bus with no brakes and send them down that track into Talbotville Valley. Yes, it's an absolute hoot, clinging off the side of steep hills and strewn with rocks that have dropped out of the sky.
More than once I found myself with the rear lockers on so Milo would slide straight ahead on compression rather than off the edge. In the dry, it wouldn't be as bad, but once more, this track, which accesses a very popular school-holiday campsite, underlines the dangers of taking anything in the High Country for granted. It'd only take one little slip after allÉ Lowmount's voice came over the radio. Not far from here his old competition HiLux had been totalled after it rolled back down a hill. He'd only just sold it, and the new owner had hopped in the tray to switch over the batteries without leaving it in gear. He had enough time to jump, but it took most of the next day to find what was left of the truck. Not much of it made it home either. A lesson well learnt and one we discussed endlessly that night around the camp fire. It was a beaut fire too, fuelled by thick logs Lowmount had chainsawed from the dead trees across the creek.
Milo suffered her first ding of the trip when I dropped a log carelessly off the roof-rack and took out the tail-light. One day I'm going to recess those bloody lights. We'd gone to some lengths to set up a decent wet camp, and a few squalls during the night proved it was worth the work. I've got to admit, as a Queenslander I'm spoiled rotten when it comes to camping and have never really thought much more than a swag and a tarp were required. This trip, like our Tassie adventure, belted some old lessons in hard again. You can never afford to take chances with the weather in places like this. The only way to get a decent night's sleep is to be prepared beforehand. I wished I'd bought along that beaut Oztent the Handbrake bought for beach trips with the kids. But ever since our wedding night, she won't let me touch anything that might break.
I did have one secret weapon - a new product I'm testing for Mr Swagman. Roughly called the Bush Mechanic's Swag - you'd never guess who's developing it, would you? - it's got enough canvas to knock up a rudimentary tent. It was a lifesaver, especially when the drizzle came on hard in the early hours. The next day dawned sunny enough for Pat to decide we'd spend the day around Talbotville working on some DVD segments and sorting the trucks. The new ones didn't need anything other than the chip packets broomed out, but both Otis and Milo needed some heavy greasing and a good look over. By the look of the map and the tracks proposed for the next couple of days, we'd be running under water half-a-dozen times a day and plunging slush for the rest of it. In fact, once the greasing was done, Pat and I decided to try to back-slide though the Wonnagatta River just for fun.
You bloody beauty! Pat nearly got washed away walking it, because the current was so strong, and Otis shifted a metre sideways for every three forwards. I put Milo through crab-style just to prove she could do it and found a new pothole that saw the water rush over the windscreen and pour through the quarter vents. Wow, I didn't know you could have this much fun with your pants on - so I took them off. Because nobody wanted to wave goodbye to a few years' worth of wages, we didn't bung the new trucks through this time. They'd get tested again, don't you worry about that, but because we had to and not just for fun.Stay tuned. Same wet time, same wet channel, because next month we almost lose the lot!
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