BATHURST’S winter festival could not have finished on a more perfect note, with hundreds of visitors and locals visiting outlying forests and roadside areas to celebrate heavy snowfalls around the region.
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Yetholme, Sunny Corner and Meadow Flat saw the biggest falls, with the area transformed into a winter wonderland.
The Great Western Highway was closed for the early part of yesterday morning, but as soon as it opened families jumped in their cars and headed out to see the snow, just as they have done for generations.
Although many were locals, there were also plenty of people who headed out from Sydney as soon as they knew the highway was open.
While yesterday, the last day of the school holidays, provided the perfect opportunity for making snowmen, sledding and having wild snowball fights, Saturday night was a very different story, with damaging high winds, heavy rain and lightning strikes across the city.
Beth Moore of Bathurst SES said there were a number of call outs after 10.30pm Saturday night and a couple more yesterday morning.
At around 10.30pm the SES was called to attend to a tree that had fallen across power lines on Seymour Street.
Essential Energy disconnected power to the site and cut the tree down before restoring power to the area.
A short while later two trees came down across Limekilns Road. One tree fully covered the road, while the other blocked just one side. They were also called to a house with a leaking roof.
Yesterday morning at around 9am another two trees came down – one across a driveway in Hill Street and the other in a backyard in Nelson Street at Raglan. Ms Moore said two crews were working Saturday night with more SES members on standby.
Although there was a damaging wind warning current yesterday afternoon, the SES hopes the worst of the wild weather is behind us.
Julian Gaal was at a property near Yetholme yesterday. He said the snow started coming down around 10.30pm on Saturday night and just kept falling.
He said he had a fantastic time getting pulled around the paddock on his snowboard.
Julian said he travelled down to the snow last week and was disappointed to find there was no natural snow, just the man-made stuff.
“Then I came home and there was more snow than you could ever want,” he said.
A group of CSU students who live on campus were also having the time of their lives in the Sunny Corner forest yesterday. While a couple of the girls were from the Central West, the others were from Sydney and the Central Coast and they were loving the snow.
“This is so much better than going to uni in Sydney. You’d never get this in Sydney,” one said.
Today we can expect a low of -1 and a maximum of 8 degrees. There is also a 90 per cent chance of between 1-5mm of rain.
