Water Dragon Canyon

Since I’m still exhausted from the weekend which consisted of about 14hours of canyoning 6 hours of cleaning out the shed and then Sunday arvo at the Scouts day, I have taken the easy way out and linked to Darren’s blog

Link to Darren’s Blog 

I have some GoPro footage of the abseils that I will edit one day this week

Great canyon and great experience
I’m getting more confident on my abseil technique and even set one up myself this trip.
I wont go into details but it involved a dodgy log and a slippery waterfall.

I need to get more confident in my climbing though, I had to get Darren to take my pack a few times as I felt like I was going to overbalance and the exposure was too great for me to risk it un-roped

Will update when I edit all the dead time out of the footage.

Lake Parramatta Stand Up Paddling

It was over 35 degrees C last night when I picked the kids up so I thought I’d take them down the lake.
There were quite a few people down there swimming, walking dogs, cycling or just sitting around the foreshore trying to cool off.

We usually take the kayaks and it takes two cars or the trailer to get them down there.
This time I thought we would try Stand Up Paddling as I can fit the small  board in the van and the larger two on the roof.

We didn’t have much time ( about 1hr before the gates shut)  so I rushed around to find swimmers and paddles etc and as such forgot our rashies, life jackets and the most important thing the GoPro so I had to use the iPhone.
I actually need a bit of time to experiment with the GoPro now that I have a fancy new LCD attachment to turn it into a more usable waterproof camera for happy snappy stills as well as fully sick 60fps 1080p action vids.

I wonder if anyone has ever done Stand Up Paddling at the lake before?
If so for the record, it was Angus who got to do it first.

He used a small kids windsurfer that I picked up up for a song a few years back from Cash Converters
Must try to actually use it for windsurfing one day!

It’s not that stable as you can see he fell off a bit (mostly on purpose to get wet) but good enough for him at the moment.

I spoke to Wind Surf and Snow on the weekend  about getting a small board for him or Emma to use.
The options are not that cheap as small second hand SUPs go for almost a grand.

Emma used my 9’6″ board and had no trouble paddling it all around the place

I used the new 11 footer which went pretty fast on the flat water once I removed the leg rope

Thanks to Angus for the photo

Here’s a vid from my iPhone
I tried to upload the raw footage but it seems every time I try to upload anything decent size/resolution it rejects it. DOH!

Maybe I need to upload it to somewhere else and just link to it…i dunno… I hate bloody computers

Emma and Angus at Thredbo circa 2006

After editing the recent clips from my GoPro and doing some house keeping I was cleaning up one of my PC’s hard drives and I found some crappy old videos off my Nokia phone of the kids skiing and mucking around in the snow from about 2006..

It just shows how much technology has advanced in multimedia, even my old Nokia N95 did DVD quality

I know I’m slack but worse still I have footage of Emma’s first ski on Mini DV tape somewhere that needs to be edited.
We setup a PC a year or so ago to do this but haven’t got around to it.

Now that Jenny has become our resident photographic and multimedia expert I might let her do the back editing of the old low res standard def VCR stuff and I’ll concentrate on editing any new HD GoPRo stuff that I may capture.

When she was too young for ski-school we used to drop Emma at the creche and go skiing and then pick her up inthe arvo and walk across to Friday Flat and let her have a ski by just walking up. She started by skiing down between my legs and then progressed to skiing a short way on her own.

We did the same for Angus I think this was the first year that hehad a go on skis, he was almost 3 I think , then next year he was old enough for Thredboland.

Here is a few clips of them skiing Friday Flat and making snow angels in the picnic area near the river across from the service station / alpine apartments, poor Angus was the butt of a few jokes after his comments at the end of the clip, he sounds a bit like Elmer Fud eh?

Bike Skiing Mount Kosciuszko

Craig “Telecrag” Martin  and I decided to do a “last ski for the season” trip since the weather was looking good.


I hadn’t done much skiing since our holiday in August when it rained and the snow was crap, I tried to get down for a back country ski in late August / early September but weather, snow conditions and other issues prevented it until I went kite skiing with Darren and Tim ( see below) in late September link to Darren’s Blog


 By the time October came around I was thinking of the beach but when the oppourtunity came along to “bend the knee”  I thought great lets do it.


We brought our bikes as well as we thought that if the snow was’nt that good or the weather turned we could ride on Sunday. 

Our intention was to go up towards Blue Lake and ski the bowl or chutes behind it however you cant really see the runs from the start of the track and the snow was a bit thin up on Carruthers Peak which would have ment down climbing to start the ski run. We would also have had to walk all the way from the crossing to the top so we decided to ride to Rawsons Pass and ski Kosci, that way we could spend all day out there and ride back to Charlotte Pass in minutes!

Morning on the main range

We headed up the track and stopped in a few spots to enjoy the spring scenery

A little way along the road we were passed by a truck carrying a digger, Telecrag said they were going to extend Mt Kosciuszko due to gloabal warming – my guess was they were just gunna dig out the toilet pit at Rawsons! Well someones full of shit – 🙂

At the Snowy bridge there was a rare site in Australia – Icebergs!

One of the Power-Rangers stopped by for a visit

Only a month ago we were snow kiting over this valley

Its Morphing Time !!!

Wonder how deep it was in winter

Etheridge

We stopped at Seaman’s Hut for a rest

Earnin’ ya turns

Lake Cootapatamba

Telecrag

Some of our tracks

The lake from the walkway

More of our tracks

Mount Kosciuszko

Main Range from Rawsons Pass

Northcote

Carruthers Chutes

 The digger had done us a favour

We got back to the car at about 6pm and thought we would just camp in Jindy, have a hot shower and get a nice meal at Bacco to go with the red Craig had brought so we drove to Perisher to find some 3G signal and Googled the caravan park and booked a spot over the phone

View from our Campsite – notice the water level – you could walk to those islands not long ago!

We parked at the dam and road to the trail head and back
You can see the plume of water in the background as they have been letting water out of the lake

Like I always say “There’s plenty of time for golf when your dead” !!!