Veteran Australian adventurer Huw Kingston came up with one of the more romantic route plans in bushwalking: draw a literal straight line from a quartz rock in his home's crazy paving to the summit of Mount Jagungal, then follow it on foot, whatever stood in the way. Roughly 50km of trackless forest, farmland and high country later, he'd attempted a 'beeline bushwalk' linking the mountain he loves with the love of his life.
Jagungal, in Kosciuszko National Park in New South Wales' Snowy Mountains, is Australia's most northerly and most solitary 2,000-metre peak. Kingston has visited it in every season, by ski, on a 150km mountain bike circumnavigation, and on trips based from historic huts like O'Keefes, Cesjacks and Derschkos. The new walk, launched in summer after spring delays, took three to four days and involved plenty of off-track bushbashing.
The romance has a long backstory. On a 2001 Perth-to-Adelaide expedition by foot, bike and kayak, Kingston spotted a low, 187-metre bump on the map, Mount Kingston, seven kilometres off route on the vast Anna Creek cattle station. He detoured to its summit on his parents' 40th wedding anniversary, gathering white quartz rocks — including a golf-ball-sized one — to present to Wendy, whom he'd met as a backpacker in Australia back in 1986. Her birthday cake that August bore a chocolate-button question mark topped with that exact rock. The two climbs, two decades apart, bookend the story.
The Jagungal beeline didn't go entirely to plan. After paddling five kilometres across Lake Jindabyne and camping among more than a hundred kangaroos at Horseshoe Bay, Kingston struggled badly on the climb, breathless and weak, and prudently dropped down to Kalkite Gap and Daveys Hut to reassess. A misty recovery morning brought him back on line via Brassy Gap and Kidmans Hut, then up the Burrungubugge valley past the site of the old Alpine Hut. Above the treeline at 1,750 metres, he traversed snowgrass and tussock past Bulls Peaks, camping near the infant Geehi River with the summit just two kilometres away. Along the way he fended off march flies, noted the absence of the feral horses that once plagued Snowy Plain following aerial culling, and reflected on First Nations stories connecting the desert's white quartz to the alpine snows, shared with him by Taungurung Elder Uncle Shane.
It's a lovely piece of writing for anyone who knows the Australian high country, and a useful reminder for those who don't: Jagungal is far quieter than nearby Kosciuszko, reachable as a side trip from the huts and valleys of the western faces, or a standalone pilgrimage. Go for the solitude, the snowgrass camps and the sense that, as Kingston writes, love and life rarely travel straight — sometimes that's the whole point.
