Gone Epic

The 20-ish peak challenge is a challange to climb all of the Australian peaks over 2000m. This is possible as they are all in the same area of New South Wales, spread over a span of ~60km.  The Plan This time we were starting high at Charlottes Pass, heading out to the Ramshead range via Mt Stillwell, before going up to Kosi and then finishing the Main Range track, before heading North to Jagungal and Gungarten, and then returning from Guthega through the Perisher mountains. The day before We drove up after work with the car packed, camping at Charlottes to get an early, but not so unreasonable start as the previous attempt. The day We started at 8am after a quick breakfast of gels and bars. We made good progress up through the Stillwells, and then dropped back down to the Kosciuszko Road. We headed up the road to Rawsons pass, turning off towards Thredbo and jogging out along the smooth, raised footpath. After a kilometer or so we veered off th...

The Plan Head North from Guthega power station up to Schlink pass on bikes, head up Gungarten and then return to the bikes for the next 20-30km north to walk into Jagungal 7/2/15 was the big day. The day We started early, 4:45 AM we started the watches -  and started the long haul up to the pass, the going was slow, but not unmanageable. Despite the cold at the start we were soon down to jerseys and shorts, leaving the warmer stuff for pickup on the return journey. The walk up to Gungarten was a pleasant reprieve, before the return to the saddle. The track continued to be good for a few kilometers, before the turn off to Valentines hut. From there the track got steeper and dropped in and out of valleys, and the track was overgrown with grass. The pace slowed to a crawl, even the descents were quite slow. Eventually we turned back about 10km short of Jagungal, as we were down to just a few energy gels each for the return journey. On the way back I broke a spoke, and popped...

It's been a plan since 2008, I don't know where Kirrill got the idea from,. but I put some effort into the feasibility and the planning. We never got around to an attempt, but the seed was sown. The aim is to hit the top 10-15 summits in Australia in a single trip, preferably continuous. This is quite doable, the majority of them are close to the main range loop, there is then a 20km detour to bag Jagungal and Gugartan. The cutoff is a dificult thing, 2000m is too low, 2100 too high, and there are a lot of multiple peaks that you need to deal with. We went with a somewhat fluid definition of decent clean prominence, and height over Stillwell. (??), also the list used here: http://www.aussie10.com and http://peakbagger.com/list.aspx?lid=2602 The peaks are: Stilwell Rams heads kozi 2228m townsend Alice Rawson Caruthers Abotts Twynham Northcote Watsons Crag Gungartan Jagungal Perisher North Perisher These can't really be done in a straight line, they for...