IT was July 2020 and we were living in Ballarat, Victoria with two little boys, aged 2 and 4. It was the start of the pandemic and what was to become a series of lockdowns which would last for two years. One evening, our 4-year old son, Gabriel, announced to us he wanted to be a mountaineer, and the mountain he wanted to climb was Mount Everest. As lofty as that dream was, as parents, we took it in our stride to make his dream come true.
We had very little mountaineering experience ourselves and Gabriel had even less. So, we started training by climbing mountains nearby, mostly in the Grampians National Park. While Gabriel walked and climbed himself, my husband, Graham carried our 2-year old son, Zac in a backpack. Gabriel’s first test as a budding mountaineer came in November 2021 when we climbed the ten highest peaks in Australia including Mt). It was four days and 74km of hiking and climbing in Kosciuszko National Park.
