Bushnuts Davies Plain Muster

[Ghostpatrol]

Great pics Aaron. Some really good ones of the kids. they look they are having a ball.

[Grey Ghost]

Great photos from everyone, we will have to get back up that way soon.

[millsy]

Sounds like you people really enjoyed yourselves up around the Mount Buffalo area.

Hope you don't mind me sharing a few memories with you of one of my more memorable glider flights into and over Mount Buffalo. Am not sure whether Bushnut has had the opportunity to see his home country from above? But if not, here is some of it as seen from some relatively low altitudes.

All of these photos were taken with the 'standard issue' Kodak Instamatic that most pilots used to verify that they had reached the required turn points in competition flights. Often of tall wheat silos next to or in a town. Hence the pretty poor quality. Not helped by me scanning these little photos into the computer! These days they don't need a camera. All gliders have a 'little black box' hooked up to a GPS. They just have to hand in their 'black box' that has recorded every minute detail of where they went - in 3D of course - lattitude, longitude and height, for every second of the flight.

The photos below were taken as part of a 3 day safari I did from Tocumwal in '83. A couple of days before that I had flown down from Forbes, climbing higher than I had ever done before, nearly 14,000 feet. Then after a rest day at Tocumwal, flew back to Forbes to retrieve my car and trailer. And then a day or two after that, this three day adventure, gliding across the terrain at some of my lowest heights!

My old wooden glider, built in 1964, had a little storage area behind the cockpit. Just enough room for a couple of sheets, a pillow, toothbrush and maybe one change of undies.

I needed the clean undies, after getting a bit too close to some of those ridge tops and rocky outcrops. It's what happens when you take off early in the morning on a summer's day, after a run of warm weather. Often the thermals don't go very high until mid afternoon. I left Benalla at 11.00am.

I had tried to fly over Mount Buffalo the day before, taking off from Corowa, but the thermals were not quite high enough to pop me over the ridges, leading in from the north west. So I had to divert and land over at Benalla. A late night at the bar, chatting to a chap who explained that the next day the Benalla pilots were towing their gliders up to a mountain airstrip near Mount Buffalo. He told me what type of glider he was flying, and amazingly, as you can see in a couple of the photos, he came up from below, and flew with me over Buffalo the next day!

The first series of shots is from above Mt Buffalo, looking east and I think a little south east. The classic hazy blue ridges, rolling away into the distance, really impressed me. I wrote 'Man from Snowy River' country on the back of one of these shots.
There is a shot of the glider at rest at the end of the day, back at Tocumwal airfield. And one of myself and my beloved Ka6 on its trailer, back in Adelaide. Must have been on a severe diet back then. I am a lot healthier and stronger these days!
The last shot in these photos was of the town centre at Benalla as I was getting ready to land at the airport, before heading back to Buffalo the next morning.

The second series are of the chalet at the top of Buffalo, and the steep cliffs around the chalet. I was amazed at seeing hang gliders jumping from a ledge, not far from the Chalet, straight out over that sheer drop. I thought they were crazy!

And the last series gives you a bit of an idea of what its like to crawl over the rocks and gum trees, at times not much further above the tree tops than the height of the MQ. This happened several times as I had to work with weak thermals, and make use of the slight updrafts from a gentle westerly breeze, as I climbed over several ridges, and flopped over the top into another valley. There is a shot of the flat country looking back towards Benalla, just before heading into the hills. And a shot showing the top of the last ridge, then the tree covered valley beyond, before the rocky outcrops on the slopes of Mt Buffalo. Glider pilots like to see a wheat paddock, or two, within gliding distance, just in case. But I had not seen any likely landing areas, other than postage stamp sized meadows, next to the roads in these valleys. And this last valley had no roads, no farm houses, no postage stamps! Just trees.

At that stage I really only had one chance, and luckily it paid off. I aimed for those north facing rocky outcrops, hoping that the sun had heated them up enough to kick off some lift. And they did! That pic of the boulders, was taken just after I thought there was something moving around in the cockpit. Maybe a mouse, or a rat. I quickly looked down to see what it was. It was my heart! My chest was pounding! I think it's what they call an adrenalin rush. Never experienced it before or since.

Would love to be doing these flights again. Maybe not! Not sure if the old ticker would be up to it these days! And besides, I don't think I would fit into that tiny cockpit now.

A day or two later I heard some fellow pilots on the radio. They were flying over the high country from Corowa to the sea side, near Bairnsdale, and back again. They invited me to join them on the jaunt, but I had to say no. Had run out of clean undies! The problem was that they were about 50km to the east, and I was just west of Tocumwal, after a low slow slog into Shepparton, and back up to the Murray. They were flying modern gliders, with glide ratios better than 40:1, and was in an old design with a ratio of 26:1 ( '1 to a brick' as they say ). There was no way I would catch up to them!

Apparently they had done a few of these 'high country' traverses before, much to my amazement.

So when you are standing at the top of one of those scenic ridges, have a look above you - you might see someone looking down from above!

[BUSHNUT]

Hey Millsy,

Where we were was moreover to the north close to the upper reachs of the Murray i know this gets confusing as I have previously written of my life in the Buckland Valley and that of the Kiewa .

It is a very long story but suffice to say that I have lived in the kiewa and the Buckland, for a brief period in the Nariel valley as well as on the Murray between Towong and Khancoban .

In my school days , I attended ten different schools , wasn't thrown out of any of them although i did tell one head master where to shove his school as we were moving on .

Thanks for the shots over the Buffalo area, the Buffalo Gorge faces the lower section of the Buckland Valley, the farm where I lived and spent many happy times is 7 miles up the road from Porepunkah, the property is called "Fall's View", My cousin now owns it - it is God's country

[millsy]

OK. We stayed at Corryong on our honeymoon, on the way to Sydney, towing a 16 foot caravan with the little Torana.

We would have passed close to where you lived near Towong when we drove up that beautiful valley in the morning light on the way up to Khankoban. I remember thinking at the time what an idyllic place to live. There was still plenty of forest left, and the farmers had carved out their paddocks along this narrow valley. We were trying to find the beginning of the Murray, but looking at the Google Maps just now, I see it was probably up around the Geehi area. I think you said one of those little tributary creeks was on your farm in fact. Great place to live Bushnut!

I tried a shower under a lovely 'little' waterfall, a few km up from Corryong. Very cold, and the height of this waterfall was such that although it looked nice, it felt like solid bricks were falling on my head!

And Kerry, who was about 13 at the time, and I went for a swim in the creek behind the caravan park, a few km south of Corryong. That was a bit of an adventure too. A nice looking mountain stream. Problem was it was flowing fast enough that allthough we could touch the bottom for a second, it just knocked us off our feet. So we had to lie on our backs and just let it carry us down the river until we could grab hold of some low, overhanging vegetation, so that we could pull ourselves out.

I guess you have heard these 'stupid tourist' stories many times before! We 'flat landers' don't understand the perils of your high country.

It looks like we took the Tooma road out of Khankoban, because I remember we visited the underground power station at Tumut, on to Cabramurra, passing Lake Eucumbene and reached Cooma in the late afternoon.

It took hours to drag the van over the mountain with the Torana. It was a forty degree day, and I had to keep stopping to let the brakes cool down. I used a water sprayer on the front discs to speed up the cooling, being careful not to over do it, and crack the hot discs. Same treatment on the radiator, again being careful not to crack the cylinder head! At one stage I had to stop in the middle of the narrow road, blocking it, as I could feel the brakes fading. A car came up from the other direction and we had a 20 minute chat. He was an announcer for the radio station broadcasting out of Bega.

I think the air-strip that the Benalla pilots used was at Porepunkah. And the first or second pic must be pretty close to having your farm in it.