Deane & Jack's Motorcycle Trip in
Australia and New Zealand
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Deane & Jack's Motorcycle Trip in Australia and New Zealand |
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March 23 - Canberra to Albury, New South Wales 471 km (292 Miles) |
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Today's ride took us over the "Snowy Mountains", a fairly short mileage day, but a day requiring quite a bit of time. I had planned this day to do two things: (1)See if the "Snowy Mountains" really get snow, and (2) To ride any road that took us closest to the highest mountain in Australia, Mount Kosciuszko. We did both today.
The Snowy Mountains are an area of relatively high mountains of the Great Dividing Range, about maybe 20 miles wide by 30 miles long. These do indeed get lots of snow, in "normal" years, and a huge hydro system uses the water runoff to run several power stations. We stopped at one of the power stations and had a short tour. That one has 10 generators, and generates 950 Megawatts of power, and can feed about 950,000 average sized homes. This year, however, they don't have the normal snow pack, having been in a drought since 1996.
We went along the skirts of Mount Kosciuszko, which is 2229 meters high (about 7250 ft.) in elevation. The highest we got was at the bottom of the ski lift, at about 1433 meters, or 4650 ft. in elevation. At the top of the road, there was a beautiful big ranch, so I couldn't resist a photo.
Riding the road around that area was fun, but not a very safe road. We rode about 60 miles, and the road surface was quite good, but the road was very narrow, had no centerline, had hundreds of curves with dozens of very sharp blind curves, and tens of switchbacks. We met a few cars on the blind curves, and worried about becoming a "hood ornament" at some of those meetings. We also met two "caravans" (camping or small house trailer pulled by a car or truck to you US people), and that was a real squeeze between the handlebars and the sheer rock on one side! But, it was the only road through that area, so we kept on. |
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