Mittagundi is a famous outdoor education centre located under the eastern edge of the Bogong High Plains. It provides young people with often transformative and life changing experiences on a working farm in an inspiring environment.
In the next installment from the 2026 Mountain Journal magazine, Lily Begg describes her experience of working at Mittagundi in 2025.
There is a pocket of the valley just down from Falls Creek where time appears to have stood still. Smoke rises from cast-iron wood stoves and the clanging of an anvil rings out from a leather-bellowed forge. Among the eucalypts nestles a farmstead made up of log cabins, stables, and a joinery full of hand-powered tools – electricity hasn’t found its way here yet.
It’s a place known as Mittagundi: the legendary outdoor education centre that has called the Victorian Alps its home for nearly fifty years.
Mittagundi’s founder, Ian Stapleton, believed that young people and mountains were natural partners. He set out to build a camp that allowed teenagers in the most formative years of their life to escape the conveniences and distractions of the modern world and come back to basics. In 1978, the first Mittagundi participants trekked down from the high plains and camped out in old buses, helping to build the log cabins that make up the farmstead today.
Since those early days, Mittagundi has grown into a tight-knit, multigenerational, and ever-expanding community. A generous network of neighbours, friends, and families have kept it alive, sharing their knowledge and time.
The programs follow a ten day pattern. A group of young people are dropped off at the top of Falls Creek where they embark on a two-day hike to get to the farm. The route takes them through windswept high plains and twisting snow gums, down a steep descent along Track 107 where the trees grow taller and straighter until meeting up, at last, with the rushing Mitta Mitta River that borders Mittagundi. The group then spends four days on the farm helping in the garden and tending the animals, going abseiling and rafting, before it’s time to hike back out again.
For many young people, Mittagundi becomes a core experience of their teenage years, providing community, belonging, and an opportunity to be a part of something bigger than themselves. Minnah, 17, has returned to Mittagundi for seven follow-up programs since first participating in a ten day program several years ago.
“Coming to Mittagundi definitely changed me. It gave me a bigger sense of the importance of community. Particularly now with technology being so relied on in our everyday lives, it has really made me value forming relationships without it… This place has provided me with a space to find myself and explore who I am as a person.” (Minnah)
Returning for multiple programs is not uncommon. Jarvis participated in two programs as a young person and his experiences inspired him to join the staff team as a Program Leader in 2026. For him, it was the unique environment to be yourself that made Mittagundi special.
“I think the most important thing Mittagundi offers to young people is a sense of community and the ability to truly be yourself. I believe that young people nowadays can become too concerned about trying to fit in with their peers and aren’t given the opportunity to truly flourish into their own person and make relationships with new people like they can at Mittagundi.” (Jarvis)
There is something about being knee-deep in mud chasing cows, or cooking dinner around a campfire under the stars that allows teenagers to make connections with each other that might have remained out of reach in their normal lives. By sharing a unique experience, the young people learn to support each other and are able to turn the program’s physical and mental challenges into an adventure, or at least a good story afterwards. Sometimes it’s “Type 2 Fun” – a valuable experience in the age of instant gratification.
I came to Mittagundi as a Program Leader in 2025 looking for a way to explore minimal impact living and share sustainable values with young people. After living without electricity, phones, flushing toilets, and instant hot water I’m convinced that we’re a little too wedded to the idea that these things are ‘the necessities’, and – after some initial incredulity and horror (You guys actually live like this?!) – I’ve seen young people consider this too.
As I write this piece, smoke hangs heavy in the January sky. We have evacuated Mittagundi to shelter in Mt Beauty while bushfires rage across the state. Harsher summers and shorter winters have felt consequences for a place that lives so closely with the land, and, as climate change threatens the future of our alpine regions, some of Mittagundi’s most important work is in building a community of people who care for its mountain home.
Taking young people careening down a river by raft, showing them the stars from a high-plains campsite, or letting them navigate by map and compass through the high-country scrub doesn’t just give them an adventure to remember, it addresses a critical need to develop relationship with our natural world.
The mountains are as integral to the spirit of Mittagundi as its people and activities, and when young people benefit from being in nature, nature gains a generation of advocates. It’s a happy symbiotic relationship.
The world Mittagundi inhabits now is in many ways different from the one in which it was first built. I’m sure Ian could never have imagined the labyrinth of techno-social pressures that teenagers face today. But Mittagundi’s founding values of resilience, humility, cooperation, and hard work remain relevant as ever.
I particularly liked Minnah’s description of my mountain home, which I’m sure resonates with anyone who has been involved with it over the years: “Mittagundi is the eddy in the fast flowing river of life that young people are constantly struggling to navigate; a calm spot.”
Life outside the valley may move fast, but Mittagundi will continue to show young people a simple way of being, with the things that really matter – connection, community, and environment – ten days at a time.
Lily Begg is a musician and writer. She worked at Mittagundi in 2025 after following a calling to the mountains. This year she is exploring the Himalayas.
Mountain Journal 
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