AAWT winter traverse - Episode 34 (Orroral Valley)

Day 34 - our last full day on the AAWT! This day was about cruising and enjoying the walk through Namadgi. Early on we bumped into a young couple camped beside the track and it was nice to be able to have a great chat given we haven’t met too many people out here. They actually soon worked out that we had seen each other in the distance when they were ski touring only a week ago on Mt Tate. We had missed meeting up with them on the summit by only a few minutes. As with many of the people we have met it sounds like there are lots of others out there who are also passionate about doing either a winter or summer traverse of the AAWT. It’s such a small world and this has been obvious to us on this trip. People keep seeing us walking with our skis and saying “You’re a long way from the snow” etc. Yet we have never been more than a couple of days walk away. Places like Thredbo and Jagungal are actually quite close (2.5 days) when you ski/walk directly from one to the other and don’t use vehicles that have to go the long way around. Linking all the main alpine environments of mainland Australia has once again been super interesting as there are definitely differences in vegetation, topography and land management between the different areas. Today we enjoyed watching the mobs of Eastern Grey kangaroos in the Cotter and Orroral River valleys. Noticeable to us is that we have not seen a single sign of any brumbies in the A.C.T. Once we crossed into Namadgi NP the horse manure that literally covers all of the bare ground in Kosciuszko NSW and parts of the Alpine NP in Victoria vanished, whilst the number of kangaroos and wallabies went from only a handful over the past 4 weeks to literally hundreds today. Lunch was late but a relaxed affair. We even lay around and soaked up some sun and tried to muster some energy for our last major hill climb of 400m over 5km. It was thus just on dusk as we rolled into the former Honeysuckle Creek Space Tracking Station site, now a campground and picnic area. Dinner was minimal however we are already planning our menu and cafe plan for our finish tomorrow.