The second snow gum summit will happen on Ngarigo Country in Jindabyne over the weekend of March 14 and 15.
There will also be guided walks and a tree planting afternoon on monday March 16.
We are delighted to announce the line-up of speakers.
The MJ magazine is an annual print run of 1,000 copes that is circulated for free to mountain and valley towns between Melbourne and Canberra.
The 2026 edition is currently at the printers (thanks to Charley and Jenny, the wonderful crew at Black Rainbow in Gippsland) and we will start distribution in early March. In the meantime, you can find a pdf version of the magazine here.
You can find general information and previous editions here.
Thanks, as always to Tess Sellar for the lovely design, and Dylan Robinson and Mike Edmondson for the cover images.
If you like this self funded project and want to see it keep going, you would be welcome to sign on as a Friend of Mountain Journal.
Horses are beautiful animals. But wild populations do not belong on public land in the mountains. One of the longest running campaigns in the high country has revolved around the efforts to have sheep, cattle, and then horses, removed from the mountains. This is one of the good news stories of the high country: governments are acting to reduce numbers of animals roaming our national parks.
In this excerpt from the 2026 Mountain Journal magazine, Linda Groom explains some of the story behind this long campaign in NSW. Continue reading “Feral horses in Kosciuszko – a political change in direction”
The devastation of Black Summer lingers in the back of everyone’s mind who knows the high country. Each year we wait to see what fires will happen, and how quickly those fires will be contained. It has been a number of years since we have had a truly awful fire season in the mountains of the mainland high country. 2025/26 has seen large and very destructive fires across much of Victoria, with Harcourt, Longwood, the Otways and Walwa probably the best known.
It has also been a summer of significant activity in the high country. This is a quick look at some of the key fires in Victoria, up until mid February. Lets hope the fire season starts to slow down from here.
As part of the 2nd snow gum summit, which will happen in Jindabyne over the weekend of March 14 and 15, 2026 (details here) Friends of the Earth is hosting a range of events in the Snowy Mountains area on Monday March 16.
The 2026 edition of Mountain Journal magazine will be out next month. The theme is Our mountains are changing, are we ready. In this first installment from the magazine, Dave Herring reflects on a good life in the outdoors.
Dave was lucky enough to have a childhood where the Main Range of the Snowy Mountains was just up the road. From his early discovery of the magic of snow, Dave has pursued a lifetime of skiing and touring in mountains around the world.
Growing up in the high country around Batlow on the north end of the Main Range in the 1960s and ‘70s was an absolute privilege. Riding horses wherever we wanted, fishing in mountain streams and learning to ski on a rope tow at Kiandra, run at that time by the Myer family from Tumut. We travelled in convoy up Talbingo Mountain, helping each other around the steep switchbacks through the slushy mud on unsealed roads just to ski on a 100m rope tow at Kiandra. When the weather dictated, we camped on the floor of what was originally the Kiandra Hotel with staff and others trapped by the elements. My dad put the skinniest tyres he could buy on our old Cortina as it helped with traction when 4×4 was not yet a thing.
When it’s blindingly hot outside, it must be time to think about winter and watch some backcountry films. That also means we are thinking about prep for the 2026 Backcountry Film Festival, which will happen in Naarm/ Melbourne this autumn.
The Backcountry Film Festival is presented by Winter Wildlands Alliance (WWA) and celebrates the power and spirit of humans in winter. More than 100 local groups host screenings, mostly in the USA, and the only Australian screening happens in Melbourne.
While we don’t have a date locked in as yet, it will be hosted again locally by RMIT Outdoors Club (ROC) and Friends of the Earth.
While we have a full program of films we will be screening in the program developed by WWA (which features 10 films), we do like to also show a local film. If you have a BC skiing/ riding / touring film that you have produced, we would love to hear from you.
Continue reading “Do you have a backcountry film for the 2026 BC film festival?”
Friends of the Earth will be hosting the 2nd snow gum summit in mid March. You can read a report on the first summit, which happened at Dinner Plain in Victoria in February 2025.
It will take place over the weekend of March 14 and 15 on Ngarigo Country in Jindabyne. The Summit will bring people together from across the Australian Alps bioregion spanning Victoria, NSW and the ACT, to address the threats facing these iconic landscapes we all know and love.
There will also be some day walks on the Monday March 16 – details to be announced shortly.
We are delighted to be able to announce the line up of confirmed speakers. They include:
The annual Mountain Journal magazine is in the final stages of editing and hopefully will be out in time for the snow gum summit, which will happen in March in Jindabyne. Then we will start distributing it across mountain and valley towns between Melbourne and Canberra.
We are stoked by the articles and images that have been contributed. The theme is ‘the mountains are changing, are we ready?’ (details here). We are covering the good and the bad, the environmental, cultural and political changes.
There are stories from many well known mountain folks, including Bridie Lawson, Caro Ryan, Darren Edwards, Dave Herring, Elyse Kochman, Grant Dixon, James McCormack, Jean-François Rupp, Kelly van den Berg, Lily Begg, Linda Groom, Mick Webster, Pauline Dowling, Peter Campbell, Rolf Schonfeld, Sam Beaver and Stephen Whiteside.
This is one last appeal to see if anyone is willing to assist us in printing the magazine.
One of the most insidious ‘invaders’ trying to change our Alpine areas (for the worse) is the generically named ‘Hawkweed’. In fact there are three species in this family of European daisies, spreading around on the Victorian Bogong High Plains and also in Kosciuszko NP in NSW. All three have hairy rosette leaves, bright daisy-like flowers over summer (two bright yellow (King Devil and Mouse Ear) and one orange (Orange!), and are the ‘perfect’ weed, spreading by releasing thousands of seeds into the winds and also creeping along with above-ground stolons (horizontal stems) like strawberries, and springing up with new plants from sub-surface roots. It also spreads chemicals that inhibit native competitors. If any, or all of these pests escape from the High Plains to settled areas we will have a major weed problem in farming and grazing lands, as has happened in New Zealand and North America.
The following is a report from Mick Webster.
Continue reading “Volunteers re-invigorate a program to find and eliminate a pest daisy in the Alps”
As Victoria braced for the potential of catastrophic fire conditions on Friday January 9, 2026, much of the attention of media and community was understandably on the fires that were already threatening towns, farms and other human assets, especially the big fires around Walwa and Longwood.
Meanwhile, multiple fires were starting due to lightning in the high country. Some, such as near Mt Howitt and on the Bogong High Plains, were contained fairly quickly. However, one has gone on to burn a significant section of the high country. The Dargo – Wonnangatta Complex (also marked as the Mt Darling – Cynthia Range fire) is not yet under control. A Complex is named where there are multiple fires in close proximity, which can then be managed by a single incident team.
Do you remember how intense Black Summer was? With much of Gippsland already on fire, on December 31, 2019, a dry lightning storm passed across the high country of north eastern Victoria and East Gippsland, starting hundreds of new fires. Forest Fire Management Victoria (FFMV) crews and aircraft swung into action, and did their best to quell the many small fires that were slowly consuming individual trees.
As a volunteer with the Mt Hotham – Dinner Plain fire brigade, I headed up the hill as the area was evacuated. There were four fires around Dinner Plain, all small and slowly consuming the unfortunate trees that had been hit by lightning.
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