KOSCIUSZKO

Mount Kosciuszko is the tallest mountain in Australia. For Americans, according to their geography lessons, that means it is the highest mountain on the Australian Continent. That also means that when Dick Bass set out to climb the Seven Summits, he included Kosciuszko.

Kosciuszko is not a very challenging mountain. It involves some hiking, but no technical climbing. Its elevation is 7,310 feet, which does not place it in the category of one of the world’s tallest peaks. Kosciuszko is by far the easiest of the Seven Summits to climb, and a mountain which has gained fame around the world solely because it is one of the Seven Summits. From base camp at the lodge to the summit represents an elevation gain of only 1,273 feet.

Yet there are those who choose not to recognize Australia as one of the seven continents, mostly non-Americans. Basically, that means they learned their geography in another country. This is the only messy part of the Seven Summits. Those other mountaineers know the seventh continent as something called Austral-Asia or Oceania. That opens up additional mountainous territory not specifically located in the Australian islands which have taller mountains.

Patrick Morrow, a Canadian climber, who also sought to climb the Seven Summits early on, decided his seventh summit was not going to be Kosciuszko, but Carstensz Pyramid in New Guinea. That is a much more formidable mountain, pretty much in the middle of nowhere. It is hard to reach and much harder to climb than Kosciuszko. The elevation is 16,204 feet above sea level.

When Bass climbed the Seven Summits and wrote his book, he introduced a new challenge to the world of mountaineering and defined it as climbing to the top of the tallest mountain on each of seven continents. Nobody pretended that Kosciuszko was in the category of Everest or Denali. But it was the geographical feature that fit the description.

Morrow muddied things with his version of the Seven Summits. All of these years later, the point remains debated as to how the seventh continent is defined and therefore which mountain is the right mountain to climb to complete the Seven Summits. For the citizen adventurer, the choice has leaned towards Kosciuszko. It is easier, more accessible, and is easy to knock off. Nobody is going to fail to complete the Seven Summits because of vicious weather on Kosciuszko.

Many top-notch mountaineers chose to polish off Kosciuszko, but also take on Carstensz Pyramid. They did not want to wake up one day and hear someone say they didn’t climb the real Seven Summits because they left out Carstensz Pyramid. Those climbers typically climb eight peaks to make seven.

To them, it was possible that some day in the future, the concept would be redrawn to exclude Australia. For sports fans who don’t believe such a thing could happen, they never imagined Major League Baseball would re-define no-hitters and remove dozens of games from that honored list which had been pitched decades earlier. So climbing Carstensz as insurance was not such a bad idea.

More recently, some even have sought to define the continent as including New Zealand, but not New Guinea, which would make New Zealand’s Mount Cook, at 12,218 feet, the tallest mountain there. New Zealand was once part of Australia, but long ago broke away.

Kosciuszko is situated in Kosciuszko National Park in the Snowy Mountains. Located nearby is Mount Townsend, which stands 7,247 feet high. That ranks as the second tallest mountain in Australia. In a peculiar twist of geographic naming, it was originally believed Townsend was taller and it was given the name Kosciuszko. When it was the discovered to be the other way around in 1892, the New South Wales Land Department swapped the names.

Originally, the name Kosciuszko was attached to a mountain in the region by Polish explorer Paul Strzelecki in 1840. He named it after General Tadeusz Kosciuszko, a national Polish hero from the Polish-Russian War of 1792.

There is a bridge in New York City called Kosciuszko that is named for the same guy. He was a Polish freedom fighter who worked as a general for George Washington. He was a big enough name that explorers chose to name the mountain after Kosciuszko. He went all over the world helping people in their battles against the establishment. He was a worthy man.

Kosciuszko is so accessible and easy to climb that it is estimated about 100,000 people visit it each year during the Southern Hemisphere’s summer. Since 2004, an ultra-marathon foot race of 150 miles ascends to the summit of the peak.

Many skiers visit Kosciuszko. The mountain is pretty much in-between Sydney and Adelaide. Sometimes I have hitchhiked there several times.

I have hitchhiked around the perimeter of Australia and it’s a funny place. I met a lot of characters. If I am asked what the culture is like, I say Deep South fifty years ago. I grew up in Texas. People I met in Australia were really into their prejudice against local natives. There was lots of beer drinking, a lot of rough-cut characters. It definitely reminded me of the Texas of my youth.

Sydney, of course, is different. There were your doctors and lawyers, but things got real rustic, real quick in the Outback. I worked my way around. I got picked up and someone would say, “Hey, do you want to work?” They needed help putting up what they called burly barbed wire fencing. The guy said it was fencing of steel poles because water buffalo would walk right through a wooden pole fence. I did that for a couple of weeks at a time, got a little pocket money, and moved on.

The fastest approach to the mountain is from Sydney, because it has a good freeway that goes to Canberra, and you just sidetrack from there. The freeway is so good that I have received speeding tickets for going a bit too fast.

Kosciuszko is by far the least challenging of the Seven Summits. It is only 7,000 feet high. That said, people do die up there if the weather turns bad and they are not prepared for it. Same old story. They get lulled into carelessness because it is not a big mountain.

It can get windy and wet. The clouds roll in, the wind comes up, and that can lead to hypothermia. The National Park has a nice environment. Low on the mountain there are ferns and trees: things that koala bears like to eat. Marsupials like kangaroos, wallabies, and wombats hang around and thrive there. Near the bottom of the mountain, you can see kangaroos and a variety of birds. The higher you climb, the plants start shrinking in size, and then the last 1,000 feet to the top is tundra.

Thredbo is a ski resort that has been around since 1957, and most climbers access the mountain by going through that community.

You have the choice of hiking over a nature trail—that’s where I saw the wombats. Or, if you wish, you can take the ski lift. The lift goes pretty high up on the mountain. It leaves you off on tundra, and with so many people walking over it, a steel mesh grate was installed for protection of the fragile tundra.

That steel grate goes up for kilometers, bringing you to within about 300 vertical feet of the summit. In older days, there used to be a bus that drove tourists to the top. They did away with bus rides years ago because of the environmental damage. But the bus trail still exists. The parks people are trying to grow it over and return it to a more natural looking state, but it hasn’t happened yet.

Some people in decent shape just run up to the top. There is no super steep angle. Near the top it becomes rocky and the rocks often lead into snow.

Kosciuszko is no more challenging than many of the mountains in the front range of the Chugach Mountains overlooking Anchorage. The highest those mountains reach are 5,100 feet or so, so Kosciuszko is taller, but no more difficult. The rocky stretch takes over high on the slope because the snow that falls prevents the tundra from growing there.

Kosciuszko, Australia’s tallest mountain, is not a challenge but can be fun to hike at 7,310 feet high

You may invest a couple of months in climbing Everest, and it may take you three weeks to climb Denali, but you can reach the top of Kosciuszko in three hours from the parking lot to the summit. I have done it twice in a row in one day. On another occasion, when I was doubling the Seven Summits, I climbed it one day, returned to the base, slept in the car, and climbed it again the next day. Then I drove back to Sydney and flew out. I was only in Australia for thirty-six hours that time.

I was trying to make more Seven Summits swings at the time, and it is expensive going to Australia. It was even $1,000 from Indonesia. So, if I completed my fourth series of Seven Summits and spent the night and climbed Kosciuszko again, I was starting my fifth series right then without having to leave and come back into the country. I rang the bell three times in one visit.

Many local people like to climb it as part of a visit to the National Park. A couple of times, I have gone up with locals who were just on an outing. One guy said he wanted to follow in Norman Vaughan’s footsteps. He was an older gentlemen and he was bewitched by Antarctica. He was mentally meshing the reality of an Antarctic expedition with his physical conditioning. We were just talking, and I just said, “Hey, come join me. Let’s go up this thing.” So he did, and we went up Kosciuszko together. It was fun training for us.

Locals do go to Kosciuszko. I don’t know if I have ever gone up on a Saturday when there weren’t maybe a half-dozen people on the summit when I got there. There’s always someone there. That’s in the summer. But I have climbed it in the winter. Winter weeds out a lot of trekkers. No matter where you go, in the winter the numbers go down.

My way of thinking is to climb when you can, because if the mountain is in a distant foreign country like Kosciuszko, you don’t know when you will get back. You could even run into a storm day on another trip. If you are there, do it. You have it in your pocket that you climbed it in winter.

The first time I climbed Kosciuszko was actually with my friend Mike Gordon from Anchorage. I said I would guide it and the cost was basically transportation. It was great to go with a friend, and his wife Shelli came, too, but I also wanted to fly off the top. At that time I was trying to do the Seven Plummets. Meaning I was trying to paraglide off the top of each of the continental mountains. I still haven’t completed that. I did not paraglide off of Carstensz Pyramid. The summit ridge is very narrow, and there is no place to set up your glider.

So I flew off Kosciuszko, but the wind was so strong, so malignant, I actually flew backwards through these large boulders, crashed myself into the rocks at the top and hyper-extended my leg. That shows you how things can go wrong even on the easiest of the Seven Summits. Climbing wasn’t hard, but flying off was dangerous and almost got me killed.

I laid out my wing. I had seen some birds soaring and that is usually a good sign. I got what we call “ridge lift.” The wind hits the mountain and the current is deflected upwards. Just as I stepped off the ridge I got lift, but right about that time I noticed all of the birds descending. They must have sensed a big, bad gust coming. They didn’t want to get blown backwards so they all landed. I popped up and was blown backwards.

It probably carried me at ten to fifteen miles per hour through the boulder field in a matter of seconds. The boulders were the size of a kitchen table and it hurt. I cracked a knee pretty badly. There was a lady up there and she saw me go down. She came running over and said, “Are you OK? I’m a physical therapist.” I told her I was pretty sure I tweaked my knee. She unfolded it very carefully.

We got to talking and she sounded American. We did the whereabouts thing, and she was from Anchorage, Alaska, too. There we all were on the summit of Kosciuszko, four Alaskans at the same time. I got her card and went in for some therapy when I returned to Alaska.

Actually, very few people can say they get paid to guide Kosciuszko because people don’t need a guide. I wanted to be able to say I guided all of the Seven Summits. Mike gave me $50 and covered the food, hotel, and transportation. I think most people would be pushing credibility to say they guided it, but I did.

The paragliding did not work out so well, but I did fly off the peak. I’ve still got a couple of serious ones I haven’t done yet. I have flown off Aconcagua from 21,850 feet, but not from the summit. That was a scary flight. It is also illegal to paraglide off the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro. There is only one occasion I heard of officials opening it up for that, and it was for a TV show. That law may soon be repealed, and when it is, I will fly.

I usually don’t paraglide if I am guiding. Kosciuszko that time was different. That was part of my guide-to-glide program. Usually spectators, people standing around, like it and think it’s exciting. Of course, people also say, “That’s crazy.” I think I have the first known flight by paraglider from the highest mountain in Europe, Mount Elbrus; the highest mountain in Antarctica, Mount Vinson; Denali in Alaska; and Kosciuszko. Not a lot of people try it. In fact, few people are crazy enough to even consider it.

In the early 1980s, I broke my ankle when I popped off a rock climb in Yosemite. In a simple twist of fate while paragliding at Hatcher Pass, about fifty miles north of Anchorage, I re-broke it. Always check your lines!

For all of the grief Kosciuszko takes because it is not a difficult climb as a member of the Seven Summits, the view from the top can be beautiful. It’s just the highest of hills, so you’re not looking miles and miles away like on some of the really tall mountains, but you can see the Tasman Sea and coast-line from there.

It can be plenty cold if you go in the winter. While there another time, I also climbed Mount Townsend, the second highest mountain in Australia. I have done it more than once. So I have climbed the second highest mountain on that continent. If I ever go after the Second Seven Summits for each continent, I will already have that one checked off.