AAWT - Orroral Ridge to Kiandra

This trip was a three day spring trip along a stretch of the AAWT which commenced on Saturday the 3rd of October 2009. It was a planned route of around 100k starting at the Honeysuckle Creek camp in ACT and finishing at Kiandra in high country NSW. I was walking with my mate Ben. We decided to skip the section from the visitor center to orroral ridge because we are Canberra locals and Mt Tennant is so close to Canberra. It also saved a bit of time.
Heading down along the trail we crossed the creek in Orroral Valley. It was pretty cold and quite deep from the melted snow up stream. We stopped for a break at Cotter hut and saw a very strange sight. The Kangaroos were going crazy for my mate's piss, lapping it straight out of "the tap" and fighting over the remainder on the ground. Someone later told me that sometimes animals crave urea. After lunch we pressed on along the trail all the way to Oldfields Hut to spend the night. This is one of my favorite huts because it is so old and beautiful.
The following morning we headed out. It was pretty cold and we quickly came across a very strange sight. The largest snowflakes I had ever seen, some the size of a 20 cent piece were falling slowly down. We weren't getting wet or even bothered by it, and they just melted as they hit the earth. It was quite bizarre. As we pushed along the track riders on horseback passed by. We were later to find out that there was a Jamboree in the park which included many utes, vans and horsefloats. Shortly after we had the first sighting of wild horses which we came across grazing in open grasslands. We passed Pockets Hut along the way, which was well and truly full of people, and Bill Jones Hut with it's dusty floor. We pulled up stumps at Millers Hut after a bit of searching to find it. There was a dead horse, frozen and submerged in the creek and partly covered by a snow drift. We made sure to take water from upstream but I would guess that the carcass was actually still fresh and in fairly good shape, if not a bit eroded by the cold water.
The final days plan was to navigate around Tantangara and make our way to Kiandra, crossing the Murrimbidgee not far from the Snowy Mountains Highway. This proved to be more than we bargained for and after a fairly solid morning of walking, we came to a steep ridge descending to our intended crossing point. It was clear that the river was much to deep to cross without swimming, and niether me nor Ben were keen to risk the cold and fast flowwing water. We ended up backtracking to the road which serviced Blue Waterholes and crossing the river by bridge. We then followed the powerline for quite a while to the highway. We were behind time for our planned pick up point and my buddy was a bit over it by this stage. So was I.
We flagged down a red commodore only 10k's from our pickup point and with only about 20 minutes to spare. We literally arrived at Kiandra right on time for the lift home. In the mad rush the driver of the commodore mentioned that Snowy Mountain Hydro use cloud seeding to capture moisture and this might explain the abnormally large snow flakes we had seen the day before.