Boutique lodging ... Kosciuszko Chalet at Charlotte Pass, mid-season last year.
As a blizzard rages, Dugald Jellie hunkers down at the Kosciuszko Chalet where skiers have sheltered since 1930.
News on the clock-radio says it's minus 7 degrees at Charlotte Pass. I awake to a sheep grazier's warning and to a wind that's scowled all night. Ice needles tap on window panes. I rub frost from the glass. It looks miserable outside. Cold. Forlorn. Empty. It looks perfectly fine to hit the snooze button.
It's the last week of August last season, and we arrive with high expectations. This is the way with snow trips. Anticipation comes usually with the rituals of getting there: packing gloves and goggles, an early start, highway coffee, first glimpse of the white stuff, the encumbered gait from the ski hire shop. Talk in the car is of isobars and cold fronts. We wonder if we'll need chains. I think I've forgotten the antifreeze.
The mood on this trip is heightened by the fact we're off to Kosciuszko Chalet, the grand old lady of the mountains that has stood as a footnote to alpine recreation on the country's highest snow country since 1930. Built by the NSW Tourist Bureau, it's a place where skiing in Australia came of age, where telemark turns became a social event and where after-dinner singalongs turned into apres-ski lessons on squeaky dormitory beds.
Burnt down in August 1938 and rebuilt the following season, the three-storey chalet marked by a baronial tower crowned with a copper-sheet cupola remains the centrepiece of the country's highest ski resort - and its oldest and coldest. Mercury dipped to minus 23 degrees on June 29, 1994, the lowest-ever recorded temperature in mainland Australia. I should be thankful for small blessings. At minus 7 this morning, it's positively mild.
The two of us had planned our trip as a boys' own adventure, hoping for blue skies, fresh snow and empty slopes. We'd rubbed dubbin into boots, brought rucksacks for back-country ski touring and packed food, sunblock and a Mount Kosciuszko map showing the lay of the land. We wanted to traverse the only terrain in the country where contours ring above 2000 metres.
The thrill of our escapade is due partly to this remoteness. We're off to the end of the road, to a place beyond the vaudeville and queues of the mega ski resorts, 1760 metres above sea level, on the Kosciuszko plateau. During most winters it can be reached only by over-snow transport or by a pair of cross-country skis and a good set of lungs. ''Perisher's like a zoo,'' says my 25-year-old Irish ski instructor, Victoria Hamilton, who charms me at first with her blue eyes and then with her smooth curves down the mountain. ''It's full of coached-up snowboarders. We're completely separate up here.''
I think of it soon enough as splendid isolation; no supermarkets, no day trippers, no mobile-phone reception. I think of Siberia. I think in this frozen upland chiselled by ice and wind it's only right to drink whisky and wear a woollen jumper patterned with snowflakes.
For most downhill skiers, it's a resort that's out of sight and out of mind. In the big business of putting bums on seats and vertical-lifting them above the treeline, it's considered a cottage industry. Mount Buller, for example, has 25 lifts; Perisher has 47 (including an eight-seater), capable of moving 51,305 people an hour. Charlotte Pass has five: a triple chairlift, a T-bar, two pomas and a beginner's moving carpet.
This boutique ski field has always been set apart from the crowd. Its rise came at a time when governments had a monopoly on the ski industry and an interest in promoting the middle-class virtues of alpine tourism. It was NSW Railways that rebuilt the chalet in 1939 and it was railway engineers who in 1938 erected a nearby J-bar hoist that was the first mechanical ski lift to operate successfully in Australia.
''We never want to lose the history of the chalet,'' says the manager of the 32-room landmark, Michelle Lovius, who started working here as a waitress 11 years ago. ''It's a hotel that keeps reinventing itself. Now it's ideally suited for family skiing holidays but 50 years ago it was the ultimate party destination, the den of iniquity in the Snowy Mountains.''
It's easy to fall for the romance of the place, despite plumbing dating from a time of wooden skis and plus fours on the slopes. Rooms and furnishings are perfectly comfortable and all its original features - including the ornate oak staircase, granite stonework and thin mullioned windows - preserve a stately grandeur. Timber floors creak under carpet and rooms have no TVs or phones, but it doesn't matter. That my room appears to shake after dark in wind gusts only adds to the occasion.
Snowfalls this winter have been late to arrive, but resorts are busy making snow. "A huge cold front is about to hit us and we're expecting falls up to 40 centimetres,'' says Lovius earlier this week. ''The long-range forecast for August is sensational … the big falls will come.''
Late last season, on our trip, the weather blows hard for two days. Gale-force winds arrive from the west, funnelling through a pass named in 1881 after Charlotte Adams, considered the first white woman to reach Australia's highest point. In seasons gone, snow dumps have been so deep it's been possible to ski off the chalet roof and I now see how this could happen.
Risk-taking behaviour and a sense of obligation send us into the maelstrom. A punching wind knocks me sideways at the top of Kosciuszko chairlift. I can barely see the tips of my skis, let alone the lift's distant namesake peak. I drop down the mountain among the snow gums, seeking shelter, and I'm glad I hired a helmet. I hardly want to identify a eucalyptus pauciflora with my head. It is, after all, a hardwood.
Icicles cling to my whiskers. I swing mostly alone on the chairlift. My ski instructor talks often about ''the freshness'' of our predicament. I remind her of ''the whiteness'' of it. The word ''blizzard'' has its etymology in Old English words for ''torch'' and ''burn'' and I now know why.
Pleasure is sought instead at the chalet bar and in $6 schooners of Charlotte's Hefeweizen, a fruity drop barrelled by the Snowy Mountains Brewery. Family groups gather in the lounge. Girls run about barefoot, squealing and playing piggyback. Other children do homework. Talk around a crackling fire is of parenting, pom-pom-making at the downstairs Frosty's Kids Club and of the weather.
''This time last year they had a blow-up jumping castle out the front,'' says a Sydney woman, here with her six-year-old daughter. ''Our only concern was sunburn.'' Another mum is here also on a return visit. ''It's safe for the kids because you can see them on the whole mountain,'' she says. ''And it's not full of out-of-control snowboarders who'll run them over.''
Spirits are high regardless of the prevailing conditions. There's camaraderie among strangers, borne perhaps from the shared experience of having a poma between your legs while being strafed by wind-blown snow and paying good money for it, or from having the wherewithal to be here, midweek, mid-winter, at a place so removed from the white noise of the city it feels a polar opposite.
The attraction of isolation has, for a select ski set, been an enduring feature of Kosciuszko Chalet. Before parabolic skis, before snow-making guns, before Thredbo and Falls Creek and five-star glamour on groomed runs, it was here at Charlotte Pass that skiers shared their good fortune in coming so far, in being so high and of making tracks in fair weather or foul from the lodge's front door.
''For more than 70 years it's been a beacon on the top of the hill where skiing started in Australia,'' Lovius says. ''It's a chalet that keeps reinventing itself into whatever people want it to be. She'll weather any storm, this place.''
Dugald Jellie travelled courtesy of Tourism NSW.
FAST FACTS
Getting there
Charlotte Pass is about nine kilometres beyond Perisher at the end of Summit Road in Kosciuszko National Park. Perisher is about six hours' drive from Sydney via Canberra and Cooma and seven hours from Melbourne. Charlotte Pass is accessible in winter only by oversnow transport. A shuttle service connects Aeropelican flights from Snowy Mountains Airport with Charlotte Pass's oversnow transport. Return tickets from the Perisher Valley Skitube terminal to Charlotte Pass cost $75 for adults and $55 for children. Book on 6457 5315.
Staying and skiing there
Kosciuszko Chalet Hotel has a range of two-night (Friday to Sunday), five-night (Sunday to Friday) and seven-night packages that can include ski hire and group lessons, with special rates for children under four. A five-night deal for two adults and two children during the Charlotte Pass Winter Festival (August 22-27), with breakfasts, dinners, lift tickets, group lessons, ski hire and oversnow transport, costs $3995. Phone 1800 026 369.
Daily lift tickets at Charlotte Pass are $89 for adults, $53 for children (aged 5-13) and $69 for seniors over 65. (Prices drop from September 5).
For more information, see www.charlottepass.com.au or the new Snow NSW Facebook page, www.facebook.com/snownsw.
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