High Country heroes
PAT EDMONDSONsits near a campfire that smokes half-heartedly in the mild autumn air. His son Mike brings the 94-year-old a cup of tea from the billy. Behind them stands a wooden hut, simple in construction yet strong against the elements that are thrown its way year-round.
The blue-grey and rusted-brown of the hut’s corrugated iron A-frame roof contrasts with the green of the surrounding grasses. Golden morning light splays across its weatherboard walls. Whatever the weather in this southern end of Kosciuszko National Park, in New South Wales, Cascade Hut (known as Cascades) is a welcome sight.
“It was on a bit of a lean,” Pat recalls of the first time, in 1969, that he saw Cascades. After hearing about it from a friend, he and his wife, Sue, had spent the day searching for it on a cross-country ski trip with their three young children in tow. “The ground and the hut were covered with snow,” Pat says. “We were relieved that we’d found it…there were no snow tents back then and maps weren’t quite what they are now.”
After 50 years of visiting Cascades (“perhaps 200 times”, he guesses), Pat has seen the hut – and the open frost hollow adjoining it, where it’s too cold for trees to grow – in all kinds of weather. “On a windy day you can see patterns in the trees as you look across the secluded valley,” he says. “The treetops move in waves and the light is amazing.”
ALPINE HUTS HOLD a special place in the national
