High Country

The High Country begins in earnest somewhere around Mansfield, when the road lifts out of the farmland and the air acquires a quality that feels mountain-specific: thin, slightly cold even in summer, smelling of granite and dry grass. The Great Dividing Range here runs northeast toward the New South Wales border, the peaks topping out above eighteen hundred metres, and the river valleys cut down between them like something carved in a hurry.

Bright and the Ovens Valley

The town of Bright sits at the base of the Ovens Valley and has made its reputation almost entirely on autumn. From late April through May, the poplars and elms and oaks along the main street and the river flats turn yellow and orange and deep red in sequence, and the light through them in the morning has the quality of something filtered through coloured glass. It’s the most photographed autumn foliage in Australia, which is saying something in a country where most trees are evergreen.

I was there in early May when the peak colour was happening simultaneously with a cold front moving through from the southwest. The combination — wet pavement, red leaves, cloud sitting on the ridge lines — was frankly absurd in its picturesqueness. I was aware of feeling like I was inside someone else’s screensaver.

The town itself is a single main street with good bakeries, bottle shops stocking local alpine wines, and a cycling infrastructure built around the Rail Trail that runs along the valley floor. The beer at the local brewery was cold and tasted of hops in a specific, resiny way that I associate with mountain air.

Mount Hotham and Falls Creek

In winter, the alpine area fills with people whose relationship to snow is aspirational — Australians who have queued for ski lifts and taken lessons and progressed through the intermediate runs with great determination. Hotham and Falls Creek are the main resorts, both above the snow line, both accessible on a weekend drive from Melbourne that requires snow chains and planning.

I went out of season, in February, when the ski fields are walking country. The summit plateau of Hotham has a quality of emptiness that you don’t find lower down — treeless heathland at altitude, the plants no higher than my knee, the wind constant and pointed. You can walk for hours and see nobody. The views are so long they start to feel theoretical.

The King Valley

The King Valley runs parallel to the Ovens and has colonised a very specific niche: Italian wine varieties. The King Valley is where an Italian immigrant named Carlo Pizzini planted sangiovese in the 1980s and eventually convinced neighbours to try nebbiolo and barbera and pinot grigio, and then the whole valley slowly became what it is now — the closest thing Australia has to a corner of Piedmont.

Lia and I drove the Prosecco Road — the valley’s wine trail, which calls itself this officially now — on a warm afternoon when the vines were heavy and the cellar doors were nearly empty. At one producer, a man named Bruno poured us a nebbiolo that tasted of something I associated entirely with northern Italy and discussed the frost events of the last three years with the focused attention of someone who spends a lot of time thinking about weather.

The Murray to the Mountains Rail Trail

The Rail Trail is two hundred and forty kilometres of converted railway, running from Wangaratta on the Murray plains up through the valley towns and into the hills. I did a single-day section between Myrtleford and Bright and came away with tired legs and a very clear memory of the smell of cycling through a hop garden — sharp, green, almost narcotic — in the early afternoon.

When to go: May for autumn colour in Bright (peak colour usually last two weeks of April into early May). June through September for skiing at Hotham and Falls Creek. February through March for walking the alpine plateau without snow. Harvest season in the King Valley runs March through April.