Lookout on Snowy Mountain Highway

We continued our journey South East again this morning, heading first to Cooma then onto the marvellously named town of Nimmitable via the Snowy Mountains Highway.
The Snowy Mountains Highway is one of those roads that’s a joy to drive with switchbacks, steep climbs and descents as you cross the Great Dividing Range. At some points you are up at over 1500 metres above sea level with some fantastic views and big drop offs as the road hugs the sides of the mountains.
From Nimmitable we headed South East for a few kilometres before beginning our first “off Tarmac” part of the trip. Following an assortment of graded tracks and four wheel drive only fire tracks we wound our way south into the South East Forest National Park. In all the off road tracks amounted to around 40k with about half of that being 4WD only. Historically the Cattleman’s Track that we followed was a trading route to the coast. The Postman’s Track that made up the last part of the route was a postal service pack horse route.
Towards the southern edge of the park we pulled up to set up camp for the night at Six Mile Creek, another free camp site created and maintained by the national park. No phone service in this remote spot – we’ve only seen 2 other vehicles since we left the tarmac about 4 hours ago and we are the only people at the camp site. Hopefully I’ll upload this post tomorrow if we find somewhere with a phone mast !
We’ve not decided for certain on tomorrow’s destination, we’re considering heading South East again to the coast. With a week left before we need to get to Melbourne for the F1 we still have some time to kill and there’s lots to see and experience in this area of NSW and further south in Victoria.

Continuing our southward journey we have moved around 150k further south into the Kosciuszko National Park following the Snowy Mountains Highway. There are a number of free camping spots alongside the reservoir.

We’ve stopped for a night at the Pines Camping Area. A nice spot with a few trees to provide some shade and a cooling breeze. We arrived fairly early so took a trip into the local town – Tumut – for some more beer before setting up camp. The new site header pic was taken a few k north at another camp site we looked at, spoilt for choice around here !

Tomorrow we’ll continue through the mountains towards Cowra, not decided on a suitable place to camp yet, too chilled out at the moment to worry about that 🙂

As planned we took a trip to Parkes this morning to take a look at “The Dish”. It’s an impressive piece of engineering and interesting to see the large number of current “cutting edge” projects that it is still taking a leading role in. The fact versus fiction display from the film was a bit of a relief as most of the important parts of the film were true. Even the decision to continue to operate the dish despite the wind speeds exceeding it’s designed specification. If you have no idea what I’m rambling on about – go find and watch the film “The Dish” 🙂

Following our visit to Parkes we had a choice of direction – head further North to see some friends at Trangie or head back South again in the hope that the weather was on the up now. in the end we decided that we’d try the South again.

As a stopping off point so that we weren’t driving too far in the day we chose a site at Young, nice and close to shops so we can stock up on food again. We also refuelled for the first time in a few days and we’ve been averaging 27mpg which isn’t too bad and is within our budgeted figures.

Tomorrow we’re continuing our journey South again and hoping to find somewhere a bit more remote to set up camp.