AAWT Victoria 2009 -Tom Groggin to Mt Beauty

On Saturday 7  February 2009 I headed out on a bushwalk from Tom Groggin, a small part of the world on the NSW/Victoria border. It was a hot day, and as it turns out, the day of the Black Saturday bushfires. My plan was to walk from the murray river at Tom Groggin to Mt Bogong and then down into Mt Beauty to catch a ride back to Canberra. The trip was a week long.

The first day was a real struggle in the heat. I hadn't even heard of UL backpacking and my rucksack even included a Drizabone. It probably weighed well in excess of 25kg with the 7litres of water I was carrying. The AAWT headed along steep firetrails and I walked the whole day until 7pm before I reached a creek only a few inches deep. By that stage my 7 litres was down to 1.

I woke up on Sunday and headed off the firetrail at Buenba Creek and up Johnnies Top to the water tank. Just before I headed off the track I sighted some wild horses, one of which was a magnificant stallion which stared at me until all the others had dissapeared into the scrub. When I got to the top I could smell smoke. This was the first sign of what was going on further south in Victoria. I grabbed out my AM/FM radio and listened to the ABC news for a while. John Brumby was delivering a message relating the lives lost and extent of the fires. I called home quickly and told them what was going on. I found the firetrail off Johnnies Top and headed down the other side. I decided to walk well into the night that day and ended up camping by a sealed road near Bennambra.

In the morning I stuffed around a bit trying to cross Morass Creek, but once I was on the other side the firetrails converged. I headed up Taylors crossing, where I stuffed around on farm tracks a bit more before heading up Mt Wills. The ridgeline was shrouded in cloud and visibility was down to only 10m for a while. This was a change from the intense hot weather. I liked the hut and stayed the night, happy to be out of the dry gum forrests.
The next day I headed off Mt Wills and up Long Spur, which is a great topographical feature which I enjoyed ascending. Eventually I came to Cleve Cole Hut on Mt Bogong. So at the end of day four I left my kit at the hut and went up to the cairn on Bogong. The round rolling grasslands of it's summit were spectacular in the setting sun. The sun glowed burnt orange because of the smoke remaining in the wake of the tragedy of the weekend. I decided to stay another day on Bogong and rest having had a slightly stressful walk up to that point. I wasn't due on the bus until friday morning.

On thursday afternoon I headed down into Mt Beauty. There was still smoke from a fire on Mt Emu as I descended. I stopped and chatted to a bloke at his fence on the edge of town, and ended up being invited in for a sandwich and beers. They knocked me around a bit after all the hot walking of the previous days. After saying my goodbyes I flagged a lift in to town to the caravan park. The bloke driving me was the local RFS commander. I stayed at the caravan park and caught the Mt Beauty school bus to Wadonga in the morning. All the kids on the bus were chatting about the events of the previous weekend, and most if not all had been affected in some way.
The trip turned out to be an eventful one. Hot, dry and steep firetrails for most of it but occasionaly beautiful. What I took away from it most though was the dangers of bushwalking in summer.