Thursday, 17 September 2015

Day trip 18/7: Snow in the Central West!

In a freezing and wet week in July, the weather warnings rang out loud "...snow expected in Central West, Illawarra, South Coast etc..."

I eagerly woke many times through the night to see if snow had fallen onto our home in the Southern Highlands. It hadn't! But it did snow 30km's down the road and very heavily on the Central West Tablelands.

"Chris it has snowed on our property!" I cried after seeing pictures posted from Wyangala Waters on Facebook of knee deep in snow!
Needless to say, another day trip was on the horizon!
We rang the Real Estate to ask for permission to enter the land since we hadn't fully settled yet.
"Not a problem, don't get bogged they've had 100m of rain up there!"
Super excited we headed out at 6am Saturday morning for the 3hr drive to Wyangala. It was our dog, Rosie-Belles first time down there and she was just as excited!

Hot coffees in hand and a bag packed with some munchies for the road, we gazed over the fields of snow through the Southern Highlands and then again in another small town called Frogmore. It was a full coverage of snow and just beautiful!

We stopped and took photos while in the thickest oart we found then eagerly set off to see snow on our property.

I set the dashcam as we drove through the first gate. We were discussi g how much snow had melted and how the ground wasn't "boggy". All off a sudden the car visciously dropped to its left side and the engine cut out..... "Just like that....." Chris exclaimed as we realised we weren't going anywhere.
We both got out and I instantly started lookinh for rocks and logs to pack around the tyres for traction. Nothing worked. After an hour we realised our only way out was with a Iron Man winch that came with the car. We didn't even know if it worked!
Chris pulled it entirely out and managed to just  wrap it around a tree that by some chance was planted in the right spot 100 years ago!
Chris set the winch going and it was just relief to see it being dragged out of the mud, the poor tree creaking the entire time. It took 15 minutes but we got it out!

We decided to park the Colorado high and dry and walk the rest of the way.
We quickly realised if we had kept going by car we wouldn't have gotten much further!  There was so much water about from melting snow!

We followed the flowing creek to the waterfall where we were met with the most amazing display of bright green moss and 1000's litres water travelling over the falls. Well worth the effort!

Speaking to the locals, they have told us it was the first snowfall in 20 years and most likely won't be seen again for another 20!

Getting bogged - Dash Cam

The Recovery

Waterfall in full flow

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