Snowy River

Both Erin and I are fans of "The Man from Snowy River". You owe it to yourself to watch the film if you haven't seen it - even if you aren't into westerns. Anyway, as a result of our watching the film, we were both excited to visit the Snowy River area. It did not disappoint.

The Snowy River flows from the Snowy Mountains, and covers a relatively large area. We drove from Canberra and saw some of the Kosciusko National Park. Mt Kosciusko is the tallest mountain in Australia at 7000+ ft. The Snowy Mountain Nat'l Park is just south of Kosciusko, and includes the small ski village of Thredbo.

Obviously, there is no skiing this time of year, and in reality they were experiencing a pretty bad forest fire just days before our arrival. We had heard on the news that some of the guests of Thredbo were evacuated, but we were allowed in with no worries.

Erin's mom had mentioned that some Idaho firefighters had traveled to Australia to help with the fires, so we were keeping our eyes open for some local fire guys. They were not hard to spot. We went out looking for dinner in Thredbo, which is kind of difficult considering that this is low season and most shops are closed. While sitting at dinner, we noticed a couple of guys walk by with US FireFighters logos on thier jackets. We stopped them and asked where they were from, and it turned out that some of them were from the northwest. One guy was from Missoula and another was living in Glacier. It was crazy to find a place with close to 20 or so Americans in a WAY out of the way place in Australia.

Thredbo was a spectacular place to visit and the drive from there was even more stunning. We drove through an area called Tom Gobbin, which was basically a rest area where we had lunch. There was a stream and it was very picturesque.

From there, we drove south to Melbourne.