Falls Creek Ski Tour 2022 - Tawonga Huts

Tawonga Huts - 2nd Sept.

A calm night with mild breezes and reasonably pleasant temperatures. We had a late start not getting up till about 8am when the sun finally hit our tent. Lots of crows in the morning with their raucous calls and the occasional magpie and currawong calls. The crows being the most noisy.

An easy breakfast of muesli, followed by some packing for lunch as we had decided that we would head off to Mt Fainter in the distance. We left our run a bit too late, at 11:20am  as we would later find out as we progressively made our way up to Mt Fainter. We followed the 4WD track up and away from the hut, losing it due to fallen trees and heavy snow, so we followed the contours along until we eventually re-joined the track. The going was pretty easy with great snow and lovely sun shine with most of us stripping down to our base layers.

We eventually made to a ridge line where we had view of South and North Fainter - we realised that we were not going to make it to Mt Fainter and still have sufficient light to make it back to camp - so we stopped to take in the views and also to have lunch, bit without a knife to cut the cheese, salami and cucumber we broke these into even chunks and eat them old style, bite of salami, bite of cheese, bite of wrap, bite of cucumber. The view that we had during lunch was really great - just looking over to Fainter and beyond to Bogong.

After lunch, photos and phone calls we headed back down the way we came, it was a fast trip back to the huts - on the way down we got hit by a very light blow of iciles. We got back to the huts by about 4 to 4.30pm. After some water collecting, firewood gathering and water heating we settled into a nice cuppa tea and some of the left short breads.

Fire going and dinner making underway - an excellent lamb casserole with freeze dried potatoes, peas and shitake mushrooms. It was a super tasty meals and appreciated after out day out and about.

The wind had blown up over night, clear skies but a lot colder than last night. We were figuring out what to do on our next day, but we had decided that we will have another night at Tawonga Huts before heading off to Weston's Hut. In hind sight this was a good decision.

It was a really pleasant day, lovely and sunny - as the slopes went into the shade they started to go icy, so it was good to turn around when we did as opposed to pushing on to the Mt Fainter summit.

Once again into bead b about 9.30pm.

All in all it was a good day albeit cold night - so much so that we all felt the cold at night, lots of spindrift and a fairly blowy night, out tents in the shelter of the trees meant we heard the wind more than felt it. The water bag that JB had left out that was full of water - about 8 liters, was frozen solid in the morning - very funny.