When the last snowflake melts

#28—The snow has settled on the alpine peaks, but for how long?

Welcome to Mind Flexing, your weekly thought expedition to everywhere and anywhere. Strap on your boots (or put your feet up), take a deep breath, and let’s get flexing.

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For some distance, the road leading home turns directly toward the snow-capped Mount Feathertop, its razored slopes arching high into the sky above the valley. If you pass at just the right moment, as I did yesterday, the setting sun colours the snow a dazzling shade of candy pink and licks it across the sky.

It’s about this time of year that the snow cap settles in for the winter, clinging to the slopes until Spring softens it into a crushed-ice cocktail that melts through October, trickling down the creeks and aquifers to the valley below. If, on a bluebird day, you ski up to The Horn of Mount Buffalo and climb the weathered tower of granite boulders, the entire horizon fills with the layered folds of the Great Dividing Range, the highest of which are capped in white, like a line of whipped cream reaching across the world.

These alpine ranges are incredibly rare within our low-lying dry landscape, and indeed, the world. Exposed and rugged, yet fragile and delicate, the Australian Alps are where snow gums, gnarly and twisted, dance trancelike in the falling snow. Where the tracks you follow are imprinted by wombats, emus, wallabies and dingoes, and where mountain pygmy possums, smaller than the palm of your hand, shelter among the rocks.

And I’m among the last generations to see them.

Dance of the snow gums, by Alia Parker

By the end of this century, scientists expect the snow coverage here to have fallen by almost 80%. What’s left will be a dusting, or patches of white cowering in shadows where the sun never shines. And in time, that too will disappear.

My neighbour, born into these parts some seventy-plus years ago, says the hills surrounding my home, which climb as high as 1,200 metres, were snow covered to at least a quarter-way down throughout most of winter when he was a child. And it wasn’t unusual to get the occasional snowfall in the valley. Only once have I ever seen anything close to resembling what he describes, and it was fleeting. Mount Feathertop, its every inch dressed in white. We tried to go up, but the snow weighed so heavily on the trees that their trunks bent low across the road, blocking the way. That was once.

Some mornings, I look out my bedroom window to snow shining from beneath the tree canopy on the ridgetop. It always melts by noon.

Up the hill, as we say, the chair lifts are cranking, and skiers and snowboarders are making tracks. But, here too, things have changed. Ever sophisticated snow machines build-up much of the snow base these days to make the ski runs commercially viable, and they need an immense amount of water to do so. Water—liquid gold—such a precious resource in a drought-prone country.

So the snows gradually drift away, as they have been for some time.

The snow depth in parts of NSW’s Snowy Mountains has declined by about one metre since the 1970s, and as the depth decreases, so does the number of days a year the Alps are covered in snow, down to 120 from around 150 in the 1980s.

Four months. Early colonists once described the peaks as snow-capped for most of the year. When the explorers William Hovell and Hamilton Hume became the first colonists to travel overland from Yass to Port Phillip Bay, they observed what was likely Mount Bogong—Victoria’s highest mountain at 1,986 metres, capped with snow. That was the 25th of November, 200 years ago on the sun-lit north-face of a mountain, a few days shy of summer.

I’ll never see the snow-covered mountains like those who have come before me—not like my neighbour, or Hume and Hovell, or the Dhudhuroa, Taungurung, Waywurru, Gunaikurnai and Jaithmathang peoples whose ancestors walked these lands around me for time unknown. But what I have seen is magical—the sort of sight you feel in your chest. It is the yet-to-be-born who will never see the snow gums dance on their stage of white as I have, for we are witnessing the end of an era. Sometime next century, for the first time in millions of years, the snow will dust the tops of this ancient mountain range a final time, and the last snowflake will melt, never to return in the age of humans.

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Things I’ve enjoyed on Substack this week:

• Give us something to believe in—by Lauren Hough,

  Badreads

  Lauren shares an insightful observation on why people won’t turn out to vote for Biden.

• eternal cosmic laze—by

  Franco Amati
  , Garbage Notes

  Ahhh, to sleep or simply do nothing. Franco reminds us to value the quiet moments in this short poem.

• Migration—by

  Marc Howe
  , blaforgus

  Migrating to another plane. A beautiful and touching vignette about the loss of a father.

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Etymology Monday

For those who missed it on Substack Notes, the word for this week was:

disaster

… and it has some stellar origins.

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