My winter wonderland comes to a close tomorrow, and i’m already planning when I can get back up here during this season.The first few days I spent training my gf up into a beast of a skier. She went from not being able to make it down the green runs such as “easy street”, to tearing up the black vertical avalanche prone nightmares such as “pump house drop” One of the elders, well 32 but an elder to us, told us black runs normally take at least a month of training and how had she improved so fast? I ensured him she had the bruises which went with it.

The Daily Routine
My military training came into good use with the lack of sleep and our over chocked daily routine we quickly devised. It went something along the lines of: Wake up, ski all morning, lunch on the slopes, ski all afternoon, dinner, night skiing, alcohol… rinse and repeat.

The Hill Of Death

Robertson: “Hey alex, check out those poor suckers walking up that hill, I’d hate to be them hehe”

I knew my army mate Robertson was up at mt. hotham, what were the chances though of his lift passing over head as we began what would become the first of many journeys up the hill of death. It wasn’t until later that him and his gf realized those poor suckers he’d been laughing at from the heights of the chair lift, was in fact us.

We came here to Mt Hotham to go down hills, so when we had to walk up the same hill so many times… the bitching would really vamp up.

Like a marathon, the hill of death is something you only want to do once a year. Unfortunetly, we continually broke that rule. Overski transport unavailable, lifts closing early, forgetting our lift tickets…. all coupled with each night when going out, having to make the journey up the hill under the influence, or carrying your mate which had gotten a bit worse for wear, quickly broke us all.

Show Us Your Harry!

We quickly learnt their’s nothing more fun than boarding a bus full of absolute drunks. And deboarding, just as fun…. we all took turns of slipping & falling down the bus stairs. Simply put nothing was sacred on this bus. Chants came out of no where, sober passengers were demanded to “show their harry’s” (a kids character dinosaur promotion mt hotham had been running) followed by further interrogation of how big was their harry…

The bus service at hotham ran till 3am each night, and although going out late made getting up in the morning a bit more of a challenge, it was well worth it.

Talking about buses, our 6 hour bus ride awaits us tomorrow for our trip back to melbourne. Hopefully I’ll get back up here sometime soon,

- Matt