Mt Alexander Tramp

Last weekend I did a tramp up to the Mt Alexander tops. Walked 3 hours into a hut on Friday night, day trip up to the tops on Saturday and then from the hut to the car on Sunday. Have to say the slog up to the tops was hard work - the valley floor at the car was around 200 metres, on Saturday we got up to around 1400-1500 metres. Both my tramping companions were at least 15 years older than me (perhaps 20, but it seemed a bit impolite to ask). Worryingly they were both more sprightly and fit than me.


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The ridge we took to get up to the tops on Saturday was really steep, and a lot of the time it was more climbing up ladders of tree roots and using shrubs to haul ourselves up rather than actually walking. I found the whole thing rather unnerving at times - some sections were rather exposed with steep drop offs. To make things worse, Saturday was cloudy. We hoped to climb above the clouds but unfortunately we never managed to get above it. This had the annoying side effect that navigation on the tops was difficult (so much so that we abandoned our original goal of climbing to the low summit). We explored a little and waited for an hour or so for the clouds to clear, but to no avail.

The trip back down to the hut wasn't as bad as I'd feared (going up the ridge in the morning I was thinking from time to time that going down would be even more dangerous). I did make it back to the hut in one piece and found the descent not too bad. On a side note the hut was really nice - used to be a field research station but has just been opened up to the public in the last year.