An Alpine Rally experience from long ago.

To explain the title, when I was a boy, the blackfellers (our term then for Australian Aborigines) who lived in the country all around us used to sleep with their dogs to keep them warm at night. If it was a cold night they would refer to it as a “Two Dog Night” because a man needed two dogs to keep him really warm. Occasionally there would come a night that was absolutely freezing; they would call that a “Three Dog Night.”

From the late sixties, I used to go every year on my motorbike to camp at the Alpine Motorcycle Rallies. These were held during the June long weekend at two different locations in alternate years: one year the rally would be at a creek off a bush track in the Brindabella Ranges not far south of Canberra; the next year it would be held at Yarrangobilly where there was a campground near a bridge across the Yarrangobilly River a short distance past Rules Point. This location is very roughly halfway between Kiandra and Talbingo or halfway between Adaminaby and Tumut or halfway between Cooma and Gundagai on the Snowy Mountains Highway. While I understand the Snowy Mountains Highway is now a sealed road, in those days it was all gravel.

I am not sure which year it was now, but the rally was at Yarrangobilly and I rode my bright Boeing-red Yamaha trail bike fitted with a Tilbrook Tom Thumb sidecar. It was whichever year was the coldest ever at Yarrangobilly.

The little Tilbrook was fully loaded with a four-man tent complete with all necessary poles and pegs, a tarpaulin, extra tent poles and pegs and plenty of extra guy ropes, a sledge hammer, a shovel and assorted tools, an “Antarctic” down sleeping bag, an air matress, some space blankets, some additional blankets, a few changes of clothes, a gas cooker, a billy, assorted cooking pans, plates and cutlery, and enough tinned food to last for ages. In short, we carried everything we needed to make a home away from home. My mate Graeme, from Paynesville, had his BMW piled high with a similar load of camping gear.

We left Bairnsdale early in the morning and headed East on the Princes Highway. At Cann River we filled up and turned North on the Cann Valley Highway. After the 57 miles (92 km) of gravel highway it was good to be on bitumen again as we headed into Bombala. We warmed up for a while in front of the fire at the pub before continuing through Nimmitabel to Cooma where we swung left onto the Snowy Mountains Highway to Adaminaby where we bought persishable supplies including our milk which was in cardboard one-litre cartons. From there it was a short run through Kiandra and Rules Point to Yarrangobilly.

It was mid-afternoon when we rode down the hill into Yarrangobilly and the welcome signals of campfire smoke from the rallyists who had arrived before us filled the valley. We selected a nice flat patch of grass quite close to the river, set up camp and cooked dinner. As we cooked, we were visited by a steady stream of other rally goers who shared the normal chinwagging about their rides in from all points of the compass. Dinner dispensed with and dishes washed, it was time to start the steady stroll from one bonfire to another at each of which we alternately warmed our buttocks and our fronts as tall tales and true were swapped between riders of their exploits over the years. It was probably quite possible to estimate the amount of Stones Green Ginger Wine that had been consumed around each fire by listening to just how tall those tall tales had become.

Now the campfire stories normally continued until well after midnight, but this year it became too perishing cold to stay out of the tents any longer. No matter how big and roaring the fire, and how interesting the yarns, it was just impossible to stay warm. The only clothing I removed was my Belstaffs and my boots. As I crawled into my Antarctic sleeping bag, I was wearing: cotton athletic singlet, cotton Briefs, cotton thermal top, cotton long johns, cotton skivvy, cotton (denim) Motorbike Scrambler jeans, cotton fleecy-lined WindCheater, a thick hand-knitted woollen jumper, and about three pairs of socks: cotton socks, then woollen socks, then Holeproof Explorers. I was not in bed long before I found myself far too hot, so I shed a few layers of clothes and didn’t feel comfortable until I was down to my long johns. As the air was bitterly cold on my face, I tightened the sleeping bag hood so there was only a tiny hole remaining for my breath to enter and escape.

I woke at first light after a splendid night’s sleep and began to unzip my sleeping bag. Then it was a mad scramble to put on all of my clothes as quickly as possible and then crawl back into the sleeping bag to warm up again. After I was suitably warmed, I exited the tent to find Graeme already up and with a fire lit. I grabbed the billy and headed for the river which sounded strange: it was almost silent and the sound of flowing water sounded strangely muffled and distant. The reason for this was soon apparent, the river was covered by a thick skin of ice. I hit the ice a few times with the billy but only seemed in danger of wrecking the billy; I was making no difference to the ice.

I went back to my sidecar and grabbed my largest hammer and went back down to the river. After a couple of smashes I had made a hole in the ice through which I filled the billy. I hurried back to the fire and observed that a disc of ice had already formed on the water in the billy. The fire soon boiled the water and we made our tea. As we both took milk I reached in to get one of the cartons of milk. It was a solid brick. Hard as granite. To get at it, we had to peel off the cardboard carton and place the milk on the breadboard where we used the bread knife to slice off thin tiles of milk to put into our tea. Everyone else around was faced with the same problem, so we just kept slicing at the milk with our bread knife until all the riders around had a tile to put in their tea or coffee.

One of the guys in a neighbouring tent was an amateur meteorologist and had mounted on his tent pole a Maximum-Minimum Thermometer. According to this instrument, the temperature during the night had fallen to eleven degrees Fahrenheit (almost -12ºC) and had only risen by half a degree. When I heard this, I commented, “That was really a fair dinkum Three Dog Night!” and promptly had to explain for the younger townies just what that saying meant.

Someone decided to try to ride his BMW straight across the river on the ice, but the ice broke and the bike fell in, so several guys had to fish it out of the river.

While talking about BMWs, none of them could be started so everybody was borrowing gas cooking stoves to heat up the bottoms of their motors so the bikes could be started. Meanwhile, my bike was a single cylinder two stroke with no oil in its engine apart from that in the petrol, so it started on the first kick.

During the day a trip was made towards Tumut to inspect part of the Smowy Mountains Hydro Electric Scheme and about thirty or more riders fell off their bikes on a very slippery icy patch of road. I had already seen the hydro power stations before, so I didn’t bother going on the ride and kept the fires burning at the camp and collected more firewood ready for the night. It was only when all the bikes came back with makeshift clutch levers or sticks for footpegs that I learned how many riders had gone down on the road in the icy conditions. Although the outfit would have taken the ice in its stride, I was kind of glad I had stayed back in camp for the day, as collision with a sliding bike might well have been a possibility.

Sunday night didn’t get nearly so cold and the river did not freeze over again.

But that Three Dog Night was definitely one to remember.