Karen and I camped at Native Dog Flat over the Christmas holiday’s. Apparently Melbourne sweltered in the heat while we enjoyed perfect weather (except for some rather amazing storms during the night). We were researching a couple of walks in the area for our forthcoming Daywalks Around Victoria guidebook. The Cobberas are Victoria’s truly last wild big mountains (Mt Cobberas is over 1800m) and it doesn’t see many walkers. To beat the anticipated warmth of the day we started our walk from the carpark on Cowombat Flat Track at just after 7am. We climbed the ridge from Bulley Creek up to Moscow Peak. The ridge is fairly easy except when you get up to the 1600m mark when you have to do a lot of boulder-hopping. We crossed a saddle and climbed Middle Peak (1777m) and found ourselves in an alpine wonderland reminiscent of the Mt Anne area in Tasmania. The flowers were literally knee deep and the 2003 fires had missed many of the old twisted snowgums which are a feature of the area. We reached the top of Mt Cobberas (1835m) by midday and scrambled to the summit where we had lunch. We could see brumbies grazing on the grass plains below. Up here there are literally thousands of wild horses. Every few minutes we disturbed them grazing on the alpine grasses. We completed our circuit walk by first descending the established walking trail and then leaving it to follow a long forested ridge back to the car. We got back to Native Dog Flat in the middle of the afternoon which meant we could relax and open a bottle of white wine we had chilling in the Waeco.
The walk was almost 16km long and most of it was off trail. A bloody good outing however and one which will appeal to experienced walkers.