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Mountain Journal

Environment, news, culture from the Australian Alps

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Cam Walker

I work with Friends of the Earth, and live in Castlemaine in Central Victoria, Australia. Activist, mountain enthusiast, telemark skier, volunteer firefighter.

Tasmania plans to open wilderness world heritage area to logging and tourism

In a worrying development, decades worth of environmental campaigning could be lost under plans unveiled by the Tasmanian government to open up the world heritage area to logging and tourism.

Under the rhetoric of supporting Indigenous people, the government has released the draft Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area Management Plan Project, while opening up the prospect of major new developments withing the region.

The National Parks and Reserves Management Act 2002 requires that the draft plan be made publically available to allow for representations to be made.

Your chance to have a say ends on Sunday 22 March 2015.

Continue reading “Tasmania plans to open wilderness world heritage area to logging and tourism” →

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Adventure Kids Festival, Mt Hotham

24th – 26th January 2015 Australia Day Long Weekend

From Mt Hotham resort management:

We are encouraging children between 4 and 12 years of age to spend more time being active in the outdoors with the Adventure Kids Festival this January here at Hotham.

The Adventure Kids offers children, and their parents, the opportunity to experience outdoor adventure activities in a controlled environment, close to traditional community services (such as transport, amenities, etc), in a very easy family-friendly way. The experience will be memorable and hopefully ignite a desire in them to further explore what our many outdoor and wilderness areas have to offer.

Over the Australia Day Long Weekend, Saturday 24th to Monday 26th January, Mt Hotham will play host to this exciting festival for Adventure Kids!

Camping, Trail Running, Mountain Biking, Orienteering, Fly Fishing, Obstacle Courses, Bush Walking, Abseiling, Bush Art, Damper Cooking, Rock Climbing are some of the activities on offer at the event for kids to get involved in!

Full details and tickets available here.

 

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World Telemark Day/ Splitboard Festival

Telemark Skier magazine, based in the US, is starting WORLD TELEMARK DAY.

They say:

“this inaugural event is a day for telemark skiers to get together and go telemark skiing. Wherever you might be around the world let’s gather at our local hills and drop a knee together!”

The Southern Hemisphere event will be on Saturday SEPTEMBER 5, 2015. Anyone interested in organising an event is welcome to do so: just post the details on the facebook page so other people can join you.

There will be a gathering at Mt Loch that day. We will meet in Mt Hotham resort in the morning, and ski to Mt Loch and Machinery Spur. Tele and AT skiers and splitboarders all welcome.

Some people will also be camping at JB Plain (between Mt Hotham and Dinner Plain) that weekend. You’d be welcome to join the camp. Just come fully prepared with food and gear for snow camping. There is a pub just a 2 km ski away if the need arises.

Splitfest DownUnder

And just a ‘date claimer’ for the 2015 Splitfest DownUnder festival.

It will be over the weekend of 21-23 August, in the Main Range of the Snowies.

Check the Splitfest website closer to the event for full details and to register.

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Lightning sparks three High Country fires

So far, the fire season has not seen any large fires in the high country. Let’s hope it stays that way! There has been one small one on the Bogong High Plains and the Mt Selwyn area. Dry lightening strikes have been problematic on a number of occasions.

The following report (Jan 8) comes from The Gippsland Times.

Department of Environment, Land, Water and Planning fire crews are responding to two fires about three to five kilometres north-east of Licola and a small fire the Alpine National Park about 28km north-west of Dargo.

As of Thursday morning, the fires were each about 0.5 hectares in size.

DELWP fire crews also responding to There was no threat to communities.

Smoke may be visible from nearby communities and roads.

You can find details on current fires via the CFA website.

 

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The Epicenter

The Epicenter is a great new cafe, opened in December 2014, that’s operating out of the ski school building at Telephone Box Junction on Mt Stirling.

Epicenter 2The Epicenter has a strong focus on mountain biking, and will be open throughout summer and autumn, then for the snow season as well. Along with Mountain Kitchen at Dinner Plain, this new operation is a stand out amongst alpine cafes: it’s small scale and friendly, with an authentic feel and commitment to adventure and mountain living.

Co-owner Hjalmar Arnold (Yully/Dingo) describes it as “the Riders Lifestyle in a shop, year round” and “the Gateway to the Alpine Backcountry”. There is no doubt that the MTB trails developed in recent years on Mt Buller and Stirling are some of the finest in the country. Yully helped build them, and is a great source of knowledge for first time riders.

They have great food, much of it made on the premises, and excellent coffee. Please drop by and support this great initiative.

There are additional renovations going on to extend the facilities at TBJ, which will be ready for winter 2015.

You can find their facebook page here.

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Scientific research from alpine cattle grazing trial ’inconclusive’

The following comes from Rob Harris at The Weekly Times. It’s always amusing to see the mountain cattlemen’s association representative bemoaning the fact that the issue has become ‘political’. Does he honestly want to say that it wasn’t a ‘political’ act when the Coalition originally rushed cattle into the Alpine Park in secret without having an actual scientific plan around the grazing trial? Of course not, its been about politics from day one.

What is telling from this report is the fact that the Coalition government classified the first year’s grazing results as being “cabinet-in-confidence”. This makes it difficult for the findings to be put into the public domain. If the results supported the argument that ‘grazing reduces blazing’ why wouldn’t they have made them public?

Continue reading “Scientific research from alpine cattle grazing trial ’inconclusive’” →

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Victorian government stops Alpine grazing trial

In the latest development in the decades long saga over cattle grazing in the Alpine National Park, the new Victorian government has confirmed it has stopped the grazing trial established by the previous Coalition government.

For background on this issue check here.

The following comes from Rob Harris at The Weekly Times.

Continue reading “Victorian government stops Alpine grazing trial” →

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Victorian Government to scrap alpine cattle grazing trial

It’s heartening to see that the new Environment Minister, Lisa Neville, has moved so quickly on the Alpine grazing issue. The following comes from the ABC.

The Victorian Government says it will remove cattle from the Alpine National Park, despite continued lobbying from the Mountain Cattlemen’s Association.

Continue reading “Victorian Government to scrap alpine cattle grazing trial” →

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Winter may be over, but the beauty and wonder of the mountains rolls on…

Some photos from Andrew Stanger, taken in late October “out the back on the Main Range of Kosciuszko National Park as the first flowers were unfurling to clear, sunny skies.”

Enjoy.

Continue reading “Winter may be over, but the beauty and wonder of the mountains rolls on…” →

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Dismantling ski lifts as the world warms up

The following is yet another story about the impacts of climate change on snow and ski resorts. The evidence of direct economic impacts continues to grow and while some resorts are heeding the call, a large number continue to ignore the issue.

Source: SBS News.

Global warming is likely to disrupt European ski resorts and cause more landslides and forest fires, affecting the agricultural sector and local economy.

With temperatures rising faster in the Alps than the rest of the world, alpine countries are working together to adapt to climate change and hope to set an example.

Continue reading “Dismantling ski lifts as the world warms up” →

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In Memoriam, Mike Moore

MG-cover-156-350hIn late summer 2010, I was stuck in the doldrums of endless heat and lack of rain, and winter seemed like it was light years away. I’d sought some shelter from the oven like air outdoors, and retreated to the coolest, darkest room in the house. I sought refuge in a cold beer and one of my favourite magazines, Mountain Gazette.

The Gazette was a lovely journal, described by its founder as being “generally about the mountains” that was produced in Colorado. It was often rambling and lateral, and seemed to cover everything from drinking and drugs to outdoor adventures, to politics in the ‘mountain states’, to musings on mountain culture. Leadville is not Miami (thankfully).

It got me thinking. I love the mountains here in south eastern Australia. And I love the culture that’s developing, growing from the thousands of people who are drawn to the hills to ski or board, to walk or paddle, to work and live. Not just the glossy consumer lifestyles of the rich and banal, but the real lives of people putting their roots down in a place that they love.

And so Mountain Journal was born. It never made it into print form. The logistics and costs were too great, and my time too limited. But it’s clearly filling some need for some people, and here we are four years later.

I just found out that Mike Moore, the founder of Mountain Gazette, passed away earlier this month. MG has long been a place of inspiration for me and I felt sad to hear of his passing. The Gazette itself transformed into an on-line journal several years ago and still publishes excellent writings and observations about mountain life. The following are some excerts from a reflection on Mike’s time as editor of the Gazette, by George Sibley.

Continue reading “In Memoriam, Mike Moore” →

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Victorian Government’s alpine cattle grazing policy heads to court

The following comes from The Weekly Times, and is written by Rob Harris.

THE “lawfulness” of the Victorian Government’s alpine cattle grazing policy will be challenged in the Supreme Court today.

The Victorian National Parks Association, represented by Environmental Justice Australia, is attempting to test the validity of the cattle grazing trial under Victoria’s National Parks Act.

The Wonnangatta Valley, in the Alpine National Park, was the site of a three-year cattle grazing trial which began in April this year.

The former federal Labor Government had blocked an original attempt to return Victoria’s mountain cattlemen to the high country when the Ted Baillieu’s Coalition came to power in 2010.

Cattle would return to the site in January 2015 if the Coalition wins the Victorian election on Saturday.

“The prime purpose of national parks is for conservation, not cow paddocks,” VNPA spokesman Phil Ingamells said today.

He said in recent weeks the VNPA had commissioned an expert ecological assessment of the Wonnangatta Valley, the site of the Coalition’s proposed three-year cattle grazing trial.

“They have been irresponsible in locating their cattle grazing trial in the remote and beautiful Wonnangatta Valley,” Mr Ingamells said.

He said the Coalition had “grabbed at least $1.5 million of taxpayers’ money for this so-called scientific trial” which he said was “primarily designed to buy votes in East Gippsland”.

“The grazing trial won’t give us any new information. Comprehensive research already shows that cattle have greatly damaged the Alpine National Park, and that grazing doesn’t significantly reduce fire risk in the high country.”

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