Hiking Melbourne

Last year Anna and I climbed a mountain and I started writing a post only to put it into the proverbial freeze-drawer of every blog: The draft folder. Now before this post gets serious freezer burn, it's time to thaw it up, add some spice and dish it up. Here we go: Ama Dablam (6812m) is known as one of the most impressive mountains in the world, not for it's altitude, but for it's beauty, aesthetics and the pure exposure encountered high on it's flanks. The mountain has gained in popularity over the past years with post-monsoon 2016 being the busiest season hosting over 400 registered climbers. It's common to encounter high altitude Everest veterans having problems with the technical difficulties encountered on the crux pitches of this climb. Summit - clear skies -32 °C - afternoon of 16th November 2016: Let's get off this mountain. It's four o'clock, we got about an hour of daylight left and we got a lot of abseiling to do. Five minutes la...

How much snow can I expect? Recently I wrote up another description for an upcoming VCC trip and I was wondering how much snow can be expected. Since this is an existential question for all back country adventurers, I gathered some data and put it into the two graphs below.  The green line shows you how much snow you can expect on average. The blue and orange lines are the max and min extremes - there is quite a wide range! And the red line shows you the percentage of bone dry seasons on that day. The Buller graph gives you an idea for The Bluff, Westridge and the Howitt area while the Hotham graph is obviously for Bogong and Feathertop. E.g. my chance of running on grass around The Bluff on the 23rd September is 25% while if I'm lucky enough to find snow it might be around the 30cm mark. You're welcome 😁 Philipp P.S.: Also keep in mind climate change is real and happening which means the red line goes up and the green line goes down. I know. It's suc...