Kosciusko

In March of 2019, I had a wonderful opportunity to go to Australia with my twin teenage daughters. While there, we took the opportunity to climb Kosciusko - one of the seven summits. There is a debate in the climbing community as to whether the seventh summit is Kosciusko, the highest point in Australia, or Carstenz Pyramid, the highest point in the pacific. Since we were in Australia I thought it would be fun to share my love of climbing with my daughters. I did have to bribe them a bit to get them to do this with me. The day before we climbed the mountain, I took them on a horseback ride in the mountains!

Kosciusko is by far the easiest of the seven summits. It is located about halfway between Sydney and Melbourne. At 7310 feet high it can be summitted via a fairly easy day hike. There are several routes to the top. My daughters and I took the route that starts from the Thredbo ski resort.

Although the trek is straightforward, we ended up climbing the route on a day with very cold and windy weather. We only had light jackets, hats, and gloves and the temperature was in the low 30’s with 20-30 mph winds. This made the trip more interesting than we had planned!

After parking at the resort, our first task was to purchase our round trip chairlift tickets to get us to the top of the ski resort where we would begin our climb. For people who want to work a bit harder, you can hike the 2000 extra feet from the parking lot to the top of the ski resort. We chose to take the easy route and ride the ski lift up.

It was super windy on the ski lift and we sat in silence most of the way with my teenage daughters occasionally questioning my sanity! After getting off the lift, we took a few minutes to get ourselves situated and then we started on our way to the summit. The route ascends gradually and is quite scenic. It winds through a barren landscape with low grasses and a lot of rocks and small boulders. In order to protect the fragile alpine plants and tundra, there is a metal grating that you walk on most of the way to the summit which protects the fragile ecosystems underneath and provides some traction for walking.

It was a sunny day and as we started walking we warmed up a bit and were able to really enjoy the feeling of being out in the mountains. The trail follows a very wide valley and you can see for miles in all directions. Since it was rather cold there were only a few others people on the trail.

After about an hour we came to a nice overlook where we took a short rest break where we drank some water and fueled up with a snack bar. Another hour of hiking took us to one more rest break before the last section to the summit. This rest break was located at the intersection of two other trails to the summit and had a restroom and a nice place to sit out of the wind for a few minutes.

The last section got a bit steeper and had switchbacks all the way to the top. After about 30 more minutes of climbing, we reached the summit. It was windy but beautiful and much to my daughters joy there was even a Snapchat filter!

We spent a good half hour on the summit taking pictures and enjoying the scenery. I told my daughters “congratulations on the first of your seven summits” and their response to me was “the ONLY of our seven summits!” 😂

Eventually we started to get cold so it was time to head back down.

The winds tapered off as we made are way back down the mountain and by the time we got back closer to the top of the ski lift, we were pretty warm. It took us about 3 hours to get to the top and another 2 hours to get back down. We took a much more pleasant ride down the ski lift and then spent a bit of time in town drinking coffee and playing in a park we found. Strangely the resort has all sorts of parks with trampolines in them so we celebrated by bouncing around on these for a while!

I am not sure if my daughters will ever climb another mountain, but I really enjoyed being able to spend this day with them on a sunny and windy mountain in Australia!