With this honorable goal we planned a hit-and-run expedition towards Threadbo (480km ssw from Sydney) starting 9 pm Friday night and finishing ~10 pm Sunday night back in Sydney.

After a nights sleep at a camping spot near Threadbo, we, together with children and people old enough that you didn't want to touch them in fear of breaking them, made an attempt at the summit. While we where at it we also ticked the second highest in the same day. Mt. Townsend is the name of that one, and we where probably the only ones to make it there that day.

All fotos so far are from Tonys digital camera. The top one on this page is taken from Mt. Townsend towards neighbouring "hills" where a storm was catching up. We later spent the dark upon a ridge staring at the lighning at neighbouring mountains (no photos, to much red wine and port ;-).
Some pics were modified in my new favorite image program - The Gimp (which is free!).
All pics are accessible from this directory.

Seasoned explorers as we were we took the chair lift up. This is me and Steve deciding not to hire skies.	Then we followed the well laid out track. Due to heavy traffic, I have to agree to this kind of protection against erosion even though it certainly takes away much of the charm trying to reach a summit...
The pictures of clouds in sunset looked really spectacular. More below.	After six km of the iron trail it was gravel all the way to the top. I and PW takes a rest. It was a bit chilly so I put my wind proof jacket on during the rest.

Make (the lemure) and Bruce (the koala in hat) made it as the first (this is unconfirmed actually, but also uncontested) two swedish gosedjur to the Kosciuszko summit.

We went on to reach Mt. Townsend. We met people who told us that there were no trail so of course we missed it. But going of trail in this area was no problem (really, this is not just compared to bushbashing in the bluies, which is not a sane thing to do.)	This is what our met us in the morning of next day (the order of the pics is crazy to fit the table layout, sorry about that).
Tony and Craig took the more climbing-like line towards the summit but finally made that...	...allowing us all to join together for dinner at the summit.
We stayed up at the summit til sunset (all being equiped with head torches for a moon-lit descent). Really amazing images from there. This also shows that these peaks are rather hilly rather than mountainious.	Here are more clouds. (The reason behind all cloud pics is that there is a Dilbert strip where Dogbert comments a cow-orkers holidays pics with something like "yes, the clouds look so different in Florida".)

Here is Craig going towards our Mt. Townsend "advance base camp" after having breakfast.

Tony posing, our camp is down left, Mt. Kosciuszko is back right. The "valley" where we camped were filled with great boulders, one could easily hang around a couple of days just bouldering (if one had brought climbing shoes. Bouldering = climbing rocks less than 4m in height without using a rope).

PW decided to free climb an obelisk during the decent (taken under influence of cheap red wine. But the photo is only made to look like it was something where you actually had to use your hands to get up, which it was not).

The end...