The Victorian backcountry festival is back for it’s 8th year. And in 2025, has become the Australian BC Fest.
It will be the same format as usual – hosted at Mt Hotham resort, with tours, workshops, parties, speakers program, repair cafe, and more.
The festival is a 100% volunteer run community festival. The organising committee is working hard to deliver another great festival.
Chuck it in your diary: friday – sunday 29 – 31 August.
Facebook page here.
Enjoy. Explore. Protect. Backcountry.
This story, written by Stephen Whiteside, chronicles the life and times of the now gone Summit Hut on Mt Bogong.
It was published in the 2025 print edition of Mountain Journal magazine (details here).
Header image: the Summit Shelter Hut, September 1938. From SCHUSS magazine.
Celebrating International Mountain Day on Country: An Inspiration and Vision from Six Peaks Speak
Honorary Professor Barry Golding AM, Federation University, writes:
I had the huge privilege as a State Library Victoria Creative Fellow in 2023. I spent a whole year researching and writing a book about six modest mountains on Country near where I live in central Victoria. It was undertaken with the strong support of DJAARA for the Dja Dja Wurrung Traditional Owners. ‘Six Peaks Speak: Unsettling Legacies in Southern Dja Dja Wurrung Country’ published in 2024 on International Mountain Day (IMD, which is celebrated globally each year on 11 December) is my main tangible outcome. I am hopeful, like DJAARA, that future celebrations of other Australian mountains on Country might become an enduring legacy. This is my story and vision.
Header image: Lalkambuk / Mount Franklin’s pine covered, breached volcanic crater (Drone Photo: Oliver Zimmermann).
From Matt Tomkins.
This photo essay was originally published in the Mountain Journal magazine, 2025 edition, available here.
The last few winters I’ve become a bit obsessed with making trips to see the snow gums in Baw Baw National Park.
Snow gums are beautiful trees. To see them at their best, you really need to be up there in winter. Streaked with incredibly vibrant reds, bronzes, oranges, and yellows and covered \with ice, their vivid colours and twisted forms stand out like flames against a snowy backdrop. It’s one of the most magical things about winter in the Australian Alps, and it’s a sight that can’t be seen anywhere else in the world.
I feel an increasing sense of urgency about making these trips.
The backcountry film festival is a pre winter institution in Melbourne. We have been screening the festival each year since 2011. This is a first announcement for the 2025 screening and a call for local backcountry films to be included in the festival.
The festival will happen on Sunday May 11, 2025.
Apart from the program of films produced by the Winter Wildlands Alliance, the festival will freature the first Australian screening of Papsura: Peak of Evil.
Continue reading “First Australian screening of Papsura: Peak of Evil”
The Mountain Journal magazine is now in its 5th year of production. We print 1,000 copies and distribute it for free through mountain and valley towns between Melbourne and Canberra during autumn each year. This year we had a guest editor – Anna Langford, who has produced an absolutely gorgeous magazine with the assistance of designer Tess Sellar and beautiful images from a range of people including Matt Tomkins.
The theme delves into what is happening to Winter. As Anna says in her introduction: “Long, deep winters are fast becoming folk tales of the past. But there is still so much to love, and so much we can do to act. To talk about our alpine winters is to lament what we’ve lost, celebrate
what we still have, record it for collective memory, and impel each other to step up and take action“.
Continue reading “Mountain Journal magazine #5 now available”
This summer has seen sustained community campaigns against specific fuel reduction burns, from Flowerdale to Gippsland. Now Friends of Bats and Habitat have raised the alarm about a large burn which is planned for the Mitchell River National Park.
Roaring Mag: There are so many redflags with this remote 1,875 ha Forest Fire Management Victoria (FFMV) burn which is expected to be ignited within ten days in the Mitchell River National Park. A rapid desktop survey brings up a whole of suite of threatened, rare and endemic flora and fauna records within this burn site. Dropping off cliffs are waterfalls, sheltered narrow gullies, large areas of old growth forest, and the most southern occurrence of warm temperate rainforest … If you went looking for a Spot-tailed Quoll, this is where it might be.
Many backcountry enthusiasts will be familiar with Huw Kingston. Most recently he has released and toured the film Alpine Odyssey, which covers his winter crossing of the Australian Alps during 2022, which was unusual because he visited all of the ski resorts along the way.
Now he is planning a winter crossing of Aotearoa New Zealand. Traveling from the tip of the North Island to the bottom of the South, he and his friend Laurence Mote plan to ski, cycle, walk and sail the full length of both islands. They also intend to ski at all 24 ski fields in the country. They start their journey on 25 June.
You can read more below.
Continue reading “Alpine Odyssey Aotearoa to cross NZ from north to south”
The backcountry film festival is a pre winter institution in Melbourne. We have been screening the festival each year since 2011. This is a first announcement for the 2025 screening and a call for local backcountry films to be included in the festival.
The festival will happen on Sunday May 11, 2025.
Friends of the Mountain are proud to invite you to Mountain Minds.
This will be a free community gathering of music, talks, workshops and yoga, designed to bring people together through their shared passion to protect kunanyi / Wellington Park from inappropriate commercial developments like cable cars, ziplines and restaurants/ whisky bars on the mountains summit. kunanyi / Mt Wellington sits above Hobart/ nipaluna and has been threatened by various development proposals in recent years.
Mountain Minds is an all – ages inclusive, alcohol free event featuring a kids area so the young ones are entertained. Including talks, music, workshops & more from an amazing array of locals, this half- day event aims to bring together a community of like minded people… to inspire, inform & enjoy all the reasons that kunanyi must stay protected.
Save the date: Saturday 3rd May, 1pm – late.
There is a facebook page for the event here.
Mountain Journal is proud to support this event.
There have been significant fears raised in the environmental community about the two high country fires that are currently burning. One (the Matlock fire) has threatened to run south to the Baw Baw Plateau. It is now contained. The second one (called the Mt Margaret fire and marked on Emergency Victoria maps as NE of Licola) is not yet under control and moving into precious high country areas. UPDATE, March 6: there is a new fire – in the Wonnangatta Valley.
We appreciate the huge effort that has gone into containing the Matlock fire. Forest Fire Management Victoria (FFMV) crews have obviously worked hard on both these fires. But a situation is unfolding at present (monday March 3, 2025) which could see an ecological catastrophe happen in the coming week.
We will post updates here as there are changes to the conditions on the fires. Scroll down to find the latest.
Continue reading “An ecological disaster is underway in the Victorian high country”
Each year it gets a little harder to ignore the impacts of climate change. For us mountain folk, the obvious signs are the more erratic winters, the dwindling snowpack, and the longer fire seasons that, increasingly, disrupt our summers.
Every natural ecosystem on the planet is being impacted by climate change. In the Australian high country, the two most obvious victims are alpine ash and snow gums. It is impossible to miss the walls of grey dead trunks and the thick and flammable regrowth as you drive up into the mountains from any valley town. Climate change is making our fire seasons longer and snow gums are increasingly being burnt beyond their ability to recover. Research from Latrobe University[1] shows that ‘long unburnt’ snow gums are now ‘exceedingly rare’ in the Victorian Alps, comprising less than 1% of snow gum forests.
And dieback is now killing thousands of trees. Dieback is a natural phenomena, caused by a native beetle. However, climate change appears to be ‘super charging’ the scale of the impact. This is because winters are shorter and warmer (meaning more beetles survive the cold months) and summers are hotter and drier (meaning trees are more water stressed and less able to produce the sap that acts as a defence against beetle infestations).
Mountain Journal 
Recent Comments