Snow Chase 17th-18th July, 2004

This weekend was an awesome weekend for snow chasing at Guyra in NE NSW with snowfalls of up to 10cm in places! We left the Gold Coast just after 2:30pm and headed for NE NSW travelling along the Pacific Highway. There were some impressive cb's just off the coast with tops pushing 18,000 feet which was impressive for this time of year. We had a cb develop right over our head and it tracked SE so we headed to Ocean Shores to get a better view of it and it was pushing out some nice solid cg's.

We had Mcdonalds at Ballina and then headed off from Grafton inland towards Glen Innes. It was a slow winding mountain road with lots of curves so it took quite a while to get to Glen Innes. We stopped at the top of some lookout about 25km outside of Glen Innes and could see the tops of the cb's lit up right along the coastline as far north as Brisbane. They were being lit up every few seconds and looked very impressive. The temperature was very cold outside pushing only about 8 degrees and a SW was blowing quite strongly. It wasn't until we were about 10km south of Glen Innes heading towards Guyra when Margy said that's that hitting the windscreen, it looks like bugs... but it's just bouncing off, not splatting. It wasn't until it became heavier and more white that we realised it was infact snow falling. It was an eerie feeling when we pulled over as there was stars above us yet it was snowing!

We arrived at the Guyra Motel at about 11pm and unpacked our gear into the room. It was snowing quite heavilly by this time and there was already some snow depths of 1-2cm accumulating around the walls. We went to sleep at about 1am with snow still falling and the temperature down to -1 degrees. We woke up at 6am to see everything white and covered in snow. There was a good covering of snow about an average of 5cm deep in places so we went for a drive to South Guyra and found a 10cm snow drift which was impressive.

The snow started to become less frequent just after midday and the cloud cover started to break up a bit which brough the temp up a bit and melted some of the snow so we went for a drive to Ben Lamond which is north of Guyra to get some more photos before driving back home to Brisbane. There was still a bitterly cold SW wind blowing however it was much warmer than Guyra.

More pictures can be found here.

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