I
find it useful sometimes to reflect on the exploits of other (much tougher) folks
who enjoy spending time in the mountains. Enjoyed your 10 hour jaunt among the
peaks and feeling like a true hard man? How about doing the same thing, every
day, for 3 days in the winter? Along those lines comes perhaps the hardest of
mountain hard men, Major Hugh Powell Gough Clewes (hereafter “The Major”).
After a career that included extensive time spent surveying areas including the
Wollemi and Blue Mountains, The Major took on a job in the 1960s as Senior
Surveyor for the Snowy Scheme.
The
crux of this role was to figure out where to put the tunnels, roads, dams and
power stations that make up the engineering marvel that is the Snowy Scheme.
Legend has it that the Major would set off for days with nothing but a wide
brimmed hat, a few snacks (energy gels perhaps?) and a small flask of rum.
Having spent a little bit of time off track in the Snowy Mountains, this most
certainly would have been a very daunting task. Not so for The Major, who lapped
up the job at hand. Did I mention he was in his 60’s at this point in time?
Whilst
in the Snowy Mountains over Easter, we found a day to take a good friend’s new
4WD on a fire trail from Geehi Flats out to Major Clewes Hut, a small building
he built to enjoy his retirement post Snowy Scheme. The hut is in a beautiful
location not far from a river, and the remnants of what was apparently once a
very beautiful garden are still present. It certainly would have been a very
peaceful, if not lonely, spot to reflect on a lifetime spent exploring. There
has evidently been quite a bit of effort put in to maintaining and restoring
the hut in recent years, and we should be thankful that there are people out
there willing to give up large amounts of their own time to ensure that we can
all enjoy a little bit of the history of these mountains.
We
spent another day walking from Charlottes Pass, up to the Blue Lake and then
onwards and outwards to the Sentinel. The Sentinel stands out as a spectacular
narrow ridge jutting out to the west of the main range, and is a little
startling after the more mellow slopes on the eastern side. I’d been planning
to make the trip out for some time, but a day had finally come around with that
rare combination of time and good weather.
The ridge starts fairly gently, but soon narrows off to a pad with steep slopes dropping away either side. Shortly before the final push to the Sentinel trig, there are two bands of rock that take this a little beyond an exposed walk. Technically easy, but enough to get the heart rate up a little bit. The views from the summit are magnificent, sweeping across the back of Carruthers peak, out to Geehi and Victoria, then through to Watsons Crags. Anyone who cracks cheap jokes about Australian mountains has clearly never been to this spot.
Earlier in the day my brother and I had run from Guthega up towards Little Twynam (not making it all the way), so the legs were feeling rather tender when we finally made it back to the cars. Still, the thought of the major traipsing all over the mountains for days on end was enough to put our little adventure in perspective.
