Mountain Journal magazine #4 now online

Once a year we produce the Mountain Journal magazine. It is distributed through mountain and valley towns from Melbourne to Canberra each autumn. 2024 will see the fourth print edition, and will be back from the printers in the next couple of weeks and distributed after that.

In the meantime, please enjoy this PDF of the magazine MJ4.

Profile: Hilary McAllister from For Wild Places

Hilary McAllister describes the development and role of the trail running group For Wild Places.

Activism and the outdoors are two pursuits that, in recent years, have evolved into a symbiotic relationship.  As history would have us believe, activism is a pursuit of the immensely passionate. Dedicated souls who shun societal expectations, choosing to reside in remote, sometimes damp, forest camps, utilising our scarcest resource – time – to protect wild places under threat.

Growing up in an average, rural family, this path to activism felt out of reach to me, too extreme for my somewhat beige sensibility. But along with descriptors such as accident-prone, nomad and feminist, activist has made its way onto my bio and into my way of life.

Are you suffering from Shifting Baseline Syndrome?

How often do you see an image or vista like this when you’re in the mountains? Whether you drive up from the valley towns through mile after mile of grey alpine ash trunks, or wander, ski or ride through the snow gum ghost forests of the high plains, you are witnessing a world that didn’t exist a generation ago.

Whereas we would have infrequent hot fire in the high country in the past, now we have fire on endless repeat. The forests get younger as we get older, yet this new reality of dead trees and thick regrowth becomes understood as being ‘normal’. Many people don’t recognise that what they see as they look out from a ski resort over burnt out hills is actually ecological collapse in real time.

Are we all just witnessing a deteriorating landscape and thinking it is ‘normal’ because we don’t have a memory of what was here before?

Loving the Vic Alps- FoEM X Patagonia event

Join the Friends of the Earth Melbourne forests campaign at Patagonia Melbourne for an evening to hear all about our Alpine campaign and where to next.

We’ve been raising awareness through community events about the special Alpine regions, highlighting the incredible outdoor and nature values that are at risk due to the impacts of logging.
With the state government’s recent announcement that it will end logging by Jan 1 2024, there is now a good chance that we can expand protections for these areas, safeguarding their future and adequately addressing the needs of vulnerable ecosystems in a rapidly changing climate.

There is still much to do: we will need to listen deeply to the aspirations of First Nations people, influence government decisions in coming months, and continue our advocacy and citizen science work in the high country.

Please join us on October 11 to be educated and inspired to take action to protect the mountains and forests that we all love.

The evening features some great short films and updates on what’s happening in the Alps.

• Campaigning in the high country. Alana Mountain is a forests campaigner with Friends of the Earth. She has been working to see high country forests protected from logging.
  
  Image: Alana in the Vic high country
• The nature of Australia’s high mountains are changing. Recent, repeated landscape-scale fires have burnt much of the subalpine forests dominated by Snow gum. Long-unburnt forests are now exceedingly rare. John will identify where long-unburnt Snow gum persists in the Victorian Alps and outline why management intervention is necessary to protect these unburnt refuges.

John Morgan is a plant ecologist from La Trobe University who has a passion for documenting high mountain floras, their dynamics over long timescales, and how they are faring in the face of invasive animals, less snow and increasing frequency of fires.

Image: John Morgan

The Australian Alp – Taylor Bennie-Faull

Mt Feathertop’s striking beauty holds a special place in the hearts of the Australian backcountry snow community. As one of the only mountains here that resembles its northern hemisphere counterparts, The Australian Alp tells a story of the profound impact it’s had on a group of keen explorers.

Taylor is a documentary filmmaker based out of Melbourne who seeks to empower viewers through connecting them to the deeper emotions of storytelling. He’s been active in outdoor sports from a young age which has fostered his love for the  natural world and ways to reduce ecological footprints. His aspiration is to use his documentaries as a means to engage others with the environment.

This gorgeous 12 minute film is a homage to one of our favourite mountains.

Cam Walker from Friends of the Earth will open the evening. Cam has been working on a range of issues in the Alps for many years, and co-write the Icon at Risk report which outlines threats to the Alps. He recently wrote this piece for the Patagonia blog Roaring Journal.

Register your attendance, see you there!

This is a free event but we ask you to rsvp for catering purposes.

https://www.melbournefoe.org.au/foem_alpine_event_patagonia

Lower elevation resorts rapidly becoming non viable under climate change impacts

We know that climate change is reducing the overall amount of snow we receive in Australia. The snow pack has been in decline since at least 1957. We also know that the loss of snow is being felt especially at lower elevations.

This is certainly being experienced this winter, where places like Tasmania and lower resorts like Mt Selwyn have had almost no snow.

POW highlights threat to climate data

Anyone who is paying attention to the state of our winters knows that they are getting more erratic. Often they start later (it’s now a rare thing to ski on natural snow on opening weekend) and winter snow is subject to more rain events, with big impacts on snow pack. While our climatic patterns go through natural wetter and drier cycles, climate science tells us that these patterns will become more extreme, with less overall snow and shorter seasons over time.

While all resorts track snowfall, the benchmark of snowfall in Australia over time comes from Spencers Creek, at a site at 1,800 metres above sea level, in the Main Range of the Snowy Mountains.

The area is midway between Perisher Valley and Thredbo, and has been visited by weather observers every week during winter since the mid-1950s, when the Snowy Hydro scheme was being constructed. The information collected by Snowy Hydro provides our best snapshot of snow pack over time. Sadly the data shows that snowpack has been in decline since 1957.

Now Protect our Winters (POW) has discovered that the frequency of data collection at Spencers Creek has decreased in recent years.

Giving back and getting involved in protecting the Alps

Much of the alpine regions of south eastern Australia and lutruwita/ Tasmania are public land, and much of that is included in national parks, World Heritage Areas, or other conservation reserves.

But many threats remain, from climate change, logging, over development, weed infestation and feral animals and so on. More than ever the alpine environments need your support.

Here are some practical things you can do to support the Alps.

‘The cure for depression is action

Every one of us has to step up and do what you can, according to what your resources are.’

• Yvon Chouinard, founder of Patagonia

Walk to the Little Dargo, November 2023

The fires of 2019/20 burnt huge areas of north eastern Victoria. The remaining unburnt forests are more important than ever. One of these areas lies in the headwaters of the Little Dargo River, just south of Mt Hotham. It is a pristine area, without roads, and containing mature forest, much of it dominated by Mountain Gums and Alpine Ash. It is an area of state forest that lies right next to the Alpine National Park.

The state government logging agency, VicForests, intends to log a total of 11 “coupes”, or sections, of mature forest in the upper Little Dargo River. These coupes are located in a series of clusters, where separate sections of bush will be harvested, creating a large zone of cleared land over time. Extensive roading networks will be needed to access the coupes.

There is a growing community campaign to oppose this destruction. In 2022 and 2023, Friends of the Earth, in conjunction with the Treasure family, who have grazed cattle on the Dargo High Plains for generations, have hosted a number of walks to show people the headwaters of the catchment and surrounding area. Over the cup weekend (November 4 – 7) we will be hosting another free guided walk.

The walk itself will happen on the sunday (November 5).

Mountain Journal magazine #3 is out!

For the third year, we have produced a print version of the Mountain Journal magazine, with content from the Mountain Journal website and many new stories.

You can read the magazine as a PDF here: MJ3.

Look for print mags in your local resort, valley town or favourite mountain hut soon.

A wander up Mt Wills & logging along the AAWT

Victoria’s highest mountain, Bogong (Warkwoolowler in the Waywurru and Dhudhuroa languages, meaning the mountain where Aboriginal people collected the Bogong Moths) is protected in the Alpine National Park.

Most people approach the mountain from the Kiewa Valley or across the Bogong High Plains. There is another route on the eastern side, following the appropriately named Long Spur to Mt Wills. This is all high elevation woodland and forests, and is the route by which the famous Australian Alps Walking Track (AAWT) leaves Bogong as it heads towards the Snowy Mountains. The 700 km long AAWT crosses the Alps from Walhalla to the outskirts of Canberra, and follows Long Spur from Bogong to Mt Wills before turning south and dropping into the valley of the Mitta Mitta River.

Mt Wills itself is a magical ‘island in the sky’ of isolated snow gum woodland, largely dominated by older trees. While it is connected by the long and high ridge back to Bogong, mostly the land around the mountain falls away to deep river valleys and forests that are initially dominated by Alpine Ash.

Now logging threatens the area between Bogong and Mt Wills.

Acknowledging the pioneers who protected the Alps

Over the past two years, we have produced two printed versions of the Mountain Journal. The first one focused on Where are we? (Visions from First Nations people about their aspirations for the Alps). The second focused on Giving back to the mountains (profiles on some of the many people doing good things in the mountains, like campaigning, guiding, ski patrolling and restoration work and so on).

The third issue (due out around New Year) will look at the people who came before us and who built our knowledge of the value of the high country, influenced our views of the mountains, and worked to have them protected.

Deep powder. The long arc of climate change. And the beauty that lies between.

After a day of grey clouds and drizzly rain, I woke up to the silence of deep, dry cold powder snow across the mountain. I jumped on the skis and meandered up through the old trees to one of my favourite hills, to be greeted by views of the higher mountains. It was pure, blissful magic. The world felt perfect. If you have ever seen the psychedelic ski film Valhalla, the words will come back to you: you can always find ‘brilliance, awe and magic running through life‘ if you wish to see it.

Two days later, more rain and a warm burst, and the snow was gone from the lower elevations and I was walking through green forest. It is mid August – when snow pack should be at its deepest. After that brief moment of bliss at feeling that things were ‘right’, I felt back in the ‘real’ world, where climate change is coming for all the places and people we love.

If you’re paying attention to what’s going on in the mountains – longer fire seasons, more erratic weather, variable snow pack and shorter winters – then its natural to feel anxious and depressed. It’s a human reaction to what is happening to the world – and the specific places – that we love. It’s the same story everywhere, from the deserts to the rainforests to the mangroves, to the forests of the Central Highlands and south west WA.