Snowy Mountains Circular Drive

Oyster Moon
Paul Foskett & Rhu Nash
Sat 23 Mar 2013 08:14

Drove a circular tour through the Snowy Mountains on the Kosciuszko Alpine Way, the Snowy Valleys Way and the Snowy Mountains Highway.  Lots of windy roads and mountain forests.  Great sign just before the entrance to Kosciuszko National Park - we didn’t see any though.  It cost $16 to enter the park – they are free if you a NSW pensioner.  National Parks are also free in Queensland. 

 

 

Roads in the Snowy Mountains like the Alpine Way are relatively new and mostly due to the Snowy Mountains Scheme.  There were tracks before where farmers used to bring their cattle up to summer pastures, you have names on maps like Byatt Camp where drovers used to camp.  Scammell’s Lookout – named after early settlers in the area who used to summer graze their cattle nearby.

 

 

The Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme was the biggest engineering project ever undertaken in Australia and employed over 100,000 people from 30 countries during its construction. The scheme consists of several lakes, 16 dams, 7 hydroelectric power stations, 31 generating turbines, and lots of tunnels (225km)and pipes, as water is shunted from one lake to another.  Jindabyne itself was one of the three towns that was moved enmass as countryside was flooded to make freshwater reservoirs.  The electricity from the scheme feeds into the national grids.  This is Tooma Dam, the water here is diverted through a nine mile long tunnel to the Tumut Pond Reservoir. 

 

 

This is the Tumut Pond Dam which forms the Tumut Pond Reservoir.  Two water systems flow into this reservoir, the above Tooma-Tumut tunnel and the  Eucumbene-Tumut tunnel.  This water feeds into Tumut Power Station.  The water then flows into the Murrumbidgee River for irrigation.  Other power station waters flow into the Murray River for irrigation. 

 

 

Great plaque.

 

 

Snowy Hydro, who run the power scheme, after running trials that increased precipitation by 14%, now cloud seed storms coming from the west, to increase snowfall in the mountains.  Moist air systems coming from the west rise up over the mountains condensing into clouds.  Sometimes the water droplets in the clouds stay as super cooled liquid and don’t form ice crystals.  The seeding helps the super cooled liquid form ice crystals around the seeding particles.

 

Kosciuszko National Park had a big fire in 2003.  Parts of the park are really spooky, amazing the trees are still standing, lot of new growth from around the roots but none from the trunks themselves.

 

 

 

There be gold in them there mountains.  This is part of Kiandra’s New Chum gold mine.  The area is just heaps of rocks and little dips.  This is result of hydraulic sluicing.  Basically a big jet of water was aimed at hillside and used to wash loose gravel and soil into wooden races lined with stone.  The stones trapped the gold bearing sediment.  A removable base on the race allowed sediment with gold in it to be easily collected.  The remains of the landscape after the gold mining and regeneration schemes.

 

 

This is a stamp battery which was used to crush rock into a fine powder which was then further processed to collect the gold.