There is bleak irony in the knowledge that two young women froze to death on Mount Bogong, within reach of a refuge built in memory of a pioneering High Country skier, Cleve Cole, who lost his own life in a blizzard on the mountain 89 years ago.

Victoria’s highest mountain has long had a reputation as a place of perilous beauty, where glorious vistas can suddenly diminish to a whirling, freezing white nothingness.

Cleve Cole being carried off the mountain in 1936. Credit: State Library of Victoria

It was in just such circumstances that Cleve Cole perished in 1936.

Among the worst tragedies on Mount Bogong occurred seven years later, in August 1943, when three young skiers died atop the mountain, apparently having lost their way in a vicious storm.

The bodies of Georgina Gadsden a

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