The ski season took a while to get started this year, for one simple reason, there wasn’t much snow. Luckily it eventually came, and when it did it was actually pretty good.

Friday night we headed off with Penny & Emma, picked up skis and trundled into Thredbo Diggings. There were some other Canberra folks there, Ant and his mates, but despite their invitation to come and have a drink we hit the sack pretty early owing to the subzero temperatures.

The next morning was pretty crisp, but not terrible, and we got going OK. We let a big group go ahead of us up Cascade Trail, and started our way up. It was Meg’s first time on X-country skies, and it was a bit of baptism of fire (ha!). It’s not super tricky terrain, but it is uphill and quite narrow, with a drop off to the river, and in the morning it was still very icy. So there was a fair bit of side-stepping going on, and general struggling.

After 10 or 20 minutes we got past the worst of the climb and it flattened out, from there the rest of the day was really nice skiing. We found a nursery slope and practiced some turns, and then had lunch on the bridge over the Thredbo river.

We spent the afternoon touring further up the valley, to the south, and just mucking around. It was pretty warm with the sun, and although it looked windy up high it was mostly still where we were. A great day’s skiing!

Back at the camp we scrounged some wood for a fire, and got dinner going. The fire was a real life saver, with it getting down to -6 or -8 or something freezing. Still we weren’t up super late.

While we slept soundly in our beds, Andrew and his mate Oli drove down from Canberra, because Andrew had been working ’til 8pm or so. Crazy lads. Still it was good to see them in the morning, bright eyed and bushy tailed.

After a bit of um-ing and ah-ing, we decided to drive over to Guthega for Sunday’s skiing. It turned out to be an excellent decision. We skied over the dam, and then spent more or less the whole day just skiing up and down through the trees.

The others being super phat hardcorde powda monkies skied all the way to the top of the ridge and back down, doing nice turns all the way. Meg & I being a bit more novice just went up and down the lower part of the slope, but it was still great fun.

After lunch Meg & I went for a bit of a tour up the valley, but realised we were on the wrong side of the river after a while and headed back. As the sun began to drop behind the ridge we managed to just get organised to get a group photo before the light went. Like herding chickens!

To top off an awesome weekend we stopped in Cooma for giant big-as-your-head hamburgers, woot!