Mt Columba East and High Moor Saddle above High Moor camp site. You can see the trackworker's hut as well as the camping platforms with our tents on them. Being a more recently upgraded site, you could see how years of use with folks walking and camping anywhere had degraded the alpine environment. Whilst "artificial", the value of the camping platforms was obvious.
We ended up stuck here for one day, cloud bound in high wind. We probably could have walked that day, but it would not have been much fun, and considering that negotiating some of the Beggary Bumps is tricky, not much of a good idea. We had planned lots of spare time - many folks do the traverse in four days - so made today a rest day.
Our next day's work was all ahead of us here. We follow a ridge on the left to the ridge running left to right above Lake Callisto, called the Beggary Bumps. Three quarters of the way along that ridge is "The Dragon", and Tilted Chasm. All of these obstacles needed traversal either over or under, and were to make for a really fun day! The ridge then swung left up to Mt Taurus (not very clear here), past Lake Haven (obscured) before continuing left to Mt Scorpio.Whilst we were stuck cloud bound at High Moor, 900 kilometres away in our home town of Canberra conditions were very hot, very windy and bone dry. That day lost 500 houses razed by bushfires in a firestorm that raced in at up to 200 km/h. Four people died, two more are still in hospital six months later, and countless hundreds, probably thousands of animals were incinerated in the bush. A disaster.
As seen on Andrew Purdam's Bushwalking Treasure Box blog.
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