It’s a nice easy walk beside the river. Then a short bit up the other side. I’d told the family. A couple of hours Easy. So we packed food and water (less for this trip) and drove up the road from the campsite to dead horse gap.

I’d looked at my topo maps and determined this one to be pretty easy. I use the HEMA iPad app for my mapping. But discovered I wasn’t paying enough attention to the scale 🙂

At dead horse gap, a signboard talked about the walks and mentioned a lookout over the start of the Murray river with a 9.6km return distance. Hmm that’s further than I’d crudely measured, I wonder if that’s the summit 🙂 but we had plenty of water. The right gear and plenty of time. So we all set off walking, the path is a formed road / fire access track and it started beside the river as I had promised before turning and then heading up steeply as it followed the side of the hill that ran beside the thredbo river! it continued up and down for the next 2 km before coming to a creek crossing that had a steel walkers bridge. We stopped for a short while as the kids threw stones into the water and wondered if we should continue on.

We choose to press on, looking at the terrain and determining that it wasn’t too bad, we were at 1560m and had to get to 1840m, that’s not too hard. So we started up the hill, it was gentle at first before it got steeper and steeper and steeper 🙂 by this time. Toby (master 4) had refused to continue and so he was transferred to the back/baby carrier while Nathan (master 5) had begun the slow whine of someone not overly impressed. But we continued on, taking it easy / slowly all the while heading up and up and up. Soon we had left the open grass land and started to enter the snow gums , when in front of us, two deer leapt across the road and into the bush, that lifted the kids spirits as we continued the slow walk up, the trail levelled out for a while before once again getting steeper, but I could see we were getting closer, so we pushed on for the summit. Eventually we came to a saddle area with a sign for Bob’s ridge. This is just past the summit and a little lower than the top, the summit area is to the left of the fire trail up into the bush near a big pile of rocks on the ridge.

We headed into the bush are and found a nice looking rocky outcrop to set up the radio and the kids and my wife sat down to have some lunch while I got the antenna and gear ready and set up against a burnt tree amongst some of the rocks, using the rocks as a seat.

Once going, I was able to make 14 contacts, most on 7Mhz including a S2S contact with Peter VK3PF and two contacts on 14Mhz.

We packed up and started the walk back. Toby had been ok on the Kosciuszko summit descent, and didn’t need to be carried, but this one was different, not long after leaving the ridge, was he stopping and demanding to be carried, so he went back into the carrier for the steep section down to the river crossing.

The weather had beena little ominous as the afternoon progressed. Darn and ominous clouds forming and the distant sound of thunder growing nearer. We had been trying to hurry the kids along as we anticipated some rain. The fire trail back along the last 2km was easier heading down, but after nearly 6 hrs walking, everyone was over it. On way the way back down the hill to our campsite in the car, the rain started and it rained for the next 3-4hrs. we had just made it back in time.

We finally got back to the car, my phone GPS tracker ( i use the Strava app) showed ~5.7km each way, and a total climb of ~250m. This summit is moderate to medium, just made a little harder with the 4yr old and 5 yr olds 😀