If you’re paying attention, then you can see what’s happening. Climate change is transforming the mountains. The fire impacts, the dwindling snow pack, the rising snow line, the spreading dieback. If you live in the climate denier cult you will find a way to explain it away. But if you’re brave enough to trust both your eyes and the science you will know that we are living in a time where the mountains are being transformed due to humanity’s impact on the atmosphere.

Tessa Campisi has produced a lovely short podcast focused on the Buffalo plateau and how it is changing.

It features the perspectives of Jacqui Durrant, Anna Langford, Keith Brettargh, John Dalbosco and Anthony Romano. I love Keith’s pithy and pragmatic acknowledgment that things have changed in the last few decades and that the days of deep snow are now gone.

When I first discovered skiing I learnt to travel on skis at Lake Mountain. That’s basically gone as a ski touring destination now, in the space of a few decades. Its the same up on Buffalo, where in the 1920s people used to ice skate on Lake Catani (the last time this was possible was in the early 1970s).

On Buffalo, the much loved beginner and family ski fields of Cresta Valley were lost when the lodge burnt down in the fires of 2006/7. The alpine ash forests on the plateau have been devastated in multiple fires, and the once glorious snow gums on the south end of the plateau look like they have been nuked. Buffalo is now a place for occasional snow play, instead of regular skiing. Thankfully the grand old Chalet remains, and is in the process of being restored and reopened.

As Tessa notes in the introductory notes:

Perched on the edge of the Victorian Alps, up a long, winding road, lies an old, granite plateau which these days is known as Mt Buffalo.

Beyond its physical geography, Mt Buffalo lies someplace out there in the collective imaginary, held together by a patchwork of memory and story.

But things are changing in the Alps, and what was once known edges towards the unfamiliar.

If we look out across the arc of time, from the deep past through the present, and nudge our gaze towards the future – what do we see?

If you know and love Buffalo, this is worth a listen. You can find the podcast here.