Table of contents for Issue 189, Spring 2023 in Wild

The walk to Lake Rhona is one of Tasmania’s iconic hikes. Long a trail known only by word-of-mouth, this eight-hour one-way walk to a glorious alpine lake reminiscent of Pedder has recently become more prominent thanks to social media. But while more hikers are setting out to see Rhona’s quartzite shores, not many of them know their track passes through a privately owned nature reserve. Even fewer know that the reserve exists, thanks to the Russian Revolution, fountain pens, and a community fundraising effort. On the Parks and Wildlife Service map of the hike to Lake Rhona, a small green rectangle marks Gordonvale Reserve, now owned and managed by the Tasmanian Land Conservancy (TLC). This rectangle was once the home of legendary backcountry man, Ernie Bond. Gordonvale, known last century…

My first multiday solo hike happened due to a COVID-19 related tantrum. The lockdown of a neighbouring area left me without work for a week, and without a playmate, so I made a snap decision to go for a six-day hike in Central Queensland, a place with few people and limited mobile phone coverage. Four hours into my eight-hour drive to the middle of nowhere, I started thinking “Is this a bad idea?” I’ve heard people say that stupid people are too stupid to know that they are stupid. What if that is me! What if I am driving toward my own death? Or worse still, driving toward public humiliation by being featured on the evening news wrapped up like a storebought burrito in a reflective emergency blanket? In a…

Melinda Oogjes and Paul Pritchard have a tendency to see the humorous side of things. Hiking the 223km Larapinta Trail in the blistering heat of the Red Centre with one half of your team suffering from a harrowing brain injury that’s robbed him of movement on the right-hand side of his body isn’t most people’s idea of a good time. But Melinda and Paul make their own fun. To pass the time, they cast themselves as renowned British mountaineer George Mallory (Paul) in the lead, and faithful Sherpa Tashi (Melinda) carrying the bags. That Paul Pritchard is in fact a renowned British mountaineer himself only made it funnier for Melinda. “We could just see the absurdity in the whole dynamic really,” she says. “Walking along in the desert for hours…

The sound is almost hypnotic. Like a metronome, my skins glide and thud as they connect with a faded track from the day past. Crystals bounce off the exposed skin of my face as a northwest wind blows a change. Overdue snow is imminent. Like ants before rain, we scurry off for the last beams of sunlight that will grant us soft passage. A pot of gold is often said to be at the end of the rainbow. Slithering through Victoria’s Alps, Razorback Ridge is different. Yes, it leads to the beloved Mt Feathertop—a backcountry beauty, the jagged, iconic peak which is the assumed reward of wandering the path of the ridge. But to me, there is reward and beauty in the path itself. Why am I out here…again? After…

Truly full circle. This shot and the accompanying article are pretty symbolic for me. Anzhela (Ange) was the instructor on a multi-pitch guiding course I was doing in the Blue Mountains. At the start of the year, I wrote some big goals for myself; the last one I had to tick off was getting an image published in an outdoor magazine. I began to tell everyone about my goal, because not only do you need to create an epic image—you need a story to go with it. I mentioned this to Ange one day during the course, and she told me of her aspiration to write an article. On a day off, we headed out to climb Disco Non-Stop Party (25) at Pierces Pass to shoot some images…and here we…

Corn snow conditions let Janina Kuzma rip full-speed turns on the classic ski mountaineering Northeast Face of Receveur Peak, Westland/Tai Poutini National Park, New Zealand. Glaciers on the South Island’s West Coast are amazing spring skiing destinations, with awesome views of the Tasman Sea. (Ed: Also check out Tom’s guide to spring touring round Wānaka, starting p126 of this issue) BY THOMAS VIALLETET Fujifilm X-T3, XF 10-24mm, f8, 1/400, ISO 160 Spring is usually a good time for packrafting in Tasmania as smaller rivers can have decent flows, neither too scratchy nor too intimidating. But it’s a fine balance. Such rivers flowing from the mountains can be steep in places and have gorges, chasms or falls that you would not want too much water in to negotiate. Mark Oates struck…

(Unless otherwise credited) Victoria’s Otway Ranges are stunning and precious, home to windswept coastlines, breathtaking waterfalls, remnant Gondwanan cool-temperate rainforest and vast swathes of grasstree-dominated heathlands. It’s no wonder the Great Ocean Road—which runs the length of the Otways—has become world famous. Hundreds of unique plants and animals live here, too, including threatened mammals like the long-nosed potoroo, swamp antechinus, southern brown bandicoot, and white-footed dunnart. An ominous threat, however, looms over the landscape: a plant pathogen called Phytophthora cinnamomi. Phytophthora (pronounced fy-TOFF-thora) is a microscopic water mould that lives in soil, water and plants. Its effect can be devastating; by invading the roots of susceptible plants, it prevents their nutrient and water uptake, causing the plant to die. Following infestation and subsequent loss of susceptible plant species, the vegetation…

When Nepal banned independent trekking on April 1st this year, lovers of solitude and snowy, mountain-teahouse treks were left reeling. Introduced suddenly and without widespread community consultation in Nepal, the new regulations blanket all the country’s national parks and conservation areas, making it now compulsory to walk with a guide. It sounds the death knell for Nepal’s golden era of exploratory mountain wanders. The new rules effectively outlaw what the Nepali government calls ‘Free Independent Trekkers’: those travelling solo, in pairs, or in small groups without a registered guide. Those who fell into the ‘FIT’ category accounted for about 27 per cent of Nepal’s 171,000 visitors in 2019, and it’s this group that the ban targets, hoping to turn them into guided-group trekkers before the year is out. POLITICS AT…

YOU’VE PROBABLY HEARD A THING OR TWO about the Overland Track. You might even know a few people who have done it, or better yet, done it yourself. It is one of Australia’s most popular hikes, and for good reason. It’s stunningly beautiful. It’s accessible. It’s mildly challenging without being gruelling. There are huts to sleep and cook in each night, and transfer services to get you to the start from the finish. In short, it’s a fantastic glimpse into proper multiday hiking in the wilderness. But if you’re like me and my good mate Jack, you’re not really interested in spending too much time in the outdoors with other people; you’re more likely to go against the grain, or to seek to up the challenge a notch compared to…

RUSKA IS THE FINNISH WORD used to describe the spectacular natural autumn phenomenon that transforms the countryside of Lapland into an explosion of colour. Golden birch leaves hang from white, gnarled branches, a beautiful contrast to the flaming-red carpet of blueberry bushes on the forest floor. The low-lying, late-afternoon sun bathes the surroundings in a soft, warm light, further deepening the blue of the lakes. It’s a seasonal spectacle that usually lasts about two weeks. But we don’t know how lucky we—myself, Fränzi, and Martin—are to be in Lapland for a week of MTB-ing during this unparalleled natural event until we land in Kittilä, far north of the Arctic circle. As soon as we leave the airport, on both sides of the road, we see nothing but the blazing colours…

SOUTHWEST NATIONAL PARK IS TASMANIA’S largest expanse of wilderness and its largest reserve, covering almost 10% of the entire state. It is famous as the home of some of our country’s most challenging multi-day hikes; the Western and Eastern Arthurs, the South Coast Track and the Mt Anne Circuit. But it’s also home to a plethora of remarkably accessible and spectacular day walks. Head west on the sealed Gordon River Road, and just a couple of hours out of Hobart you are soon driving past rugged mountains, through buttongrass plains and into vistas that make you slam on the brakes and wonder how you can get closer and deeper into the imposing landscape. Hidden in this landscape is a cornucopia of faint tracks and challenging trails that climb up and…

The other day, I was bushbashing off-trail through rainforest near my home. It was lush and green. The smooth, clean trunks of coachwoods punched upwards. Vines looped from the sky. Ferns smothered the ground; the boulders were smeared with moss. The rain, meanwhile, was thumping down, and fat leeches sucked blood from my ankles. And what I was thinking about was…fish. Not the freshwater type that might swim up the clear, rushing creek I was walking next to; instead, I was thinking of the ocean variety, and what’s more, I was specifically thinking of fish from the other side of the planet. You see, the rainjacket I was wearing, the one that was keeping me dry in this downpour, was once a South American fishing net. I wondered how many…

(unless otherwise noted) “She’s about 500m from here,” says Patrick Giumelli. Patrick, a rewilding program ecologist from the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), is tracking platypuses in the Royal National Park, which lies just south of Sydney. While the park—which coincidentally is the world’s second-oldest national park—used to have platypuses in its waterways, there have been no confirmed sightings for decades. Now, though, the VHF antenna which Patrick waves about emits clicking sounds, indicating that a tagged female is nearby. She is one of six females released a couple of weeks earlier, in mid-May 2023, with four males being released into the national park about a week earlier. These unique egg-laying monotremes—relocated from the New South Wales Bombala and Dalgety regions—will be monitored regularly in their new environment, to track progress…

A handful of photos. A few words. And an unfamiliar name. That’s how it started. One ordinary evening (‘ordinary’ in the sense that I was doing the usual—avoiding sleep in favour of scrolling through maps and websites for more inspirational photos and trip reports), I happened across an intriguing post on a blog: ‘The Trading Route: Goulburn River National Park, NSW’. The blog was awildland, and it’s the work of Craig Fardell and Chris Armstrong, frequent contributors to Wild Mag (Ed: In fact, they’ve contributed the track notes to this very issue). And just as they’d done repeatedly in the past, the pair presented me with a national park I hadn’t the foggiest about, in a region I’d not explored before. Craig (AKA Caz) is an excellent photographer, and the…

“People die out here all the time.” It was an eerily dark day in Central Australia, a day suffocated by gun-metal clouds, and we were being driven from Alice Springs to Ormiston Gorge, our walk’s start and end point. Our driver continued: “A 20-year-old had a heart attack last week.” Hmm. That’s interesting I thought, quietly checking my pulse, and listening for anything that might be an augury, like, of cardiac arrest. Most walkers coming to this part of the world are here to tackle the famous Larapinta Trail; we were not most walkers. Instead, we—a Mötley nine-person Crue of which I was the lesser part—were here for an eight-day semi-circumnavigation of one of the area’s geologic centrepieces, the crumpled uprising of the Giles Massif. The massif is part of…

INVISIGRIP GLOVES: CYCLONE Scrub gloves are the perfect way to protect your hands while wriggling through Tasmania’s sub-alpine flora on warm days. Cyclone’s Invisigrip Tough Gardening Gloves (get ‘em at Bunnings for just $7.98) have a rubber palm and breathable mesh panel on the top. These gloves also have excellent grip and are suitable for rock scrambling. On the cold, wet days, compliment them with a set of thermal glove liners (eg Rab Primaloft Glove) and/or shell mitts (eg Outdoor Research Revel Shell Mitts). ANDY SZOLLOSI AEROS ULTRALIGHT PILLOW: SEA TO SUMMIT A good night’s sleep can be the difference between a memorable trip into the wild or a soul-crushing experience. For years, I crammed an old pillow into my pack until someone had the good sense to give me…

PAST OUTDOORS: A PASSION FOR THE OUTDOORS, CONSERVATION AND CREATIVITY PAST Outdoors offers a carefully selected range of hiking, camping and expedition equipment tailored to meet the needs of your next adventure. They also manufacture a range of ultralight shelters that can be heated with a titanium wood stove. When you visit the retail store south of the Royal National Park in Helensburgh NSW, you can expect personal, expert advice from Dave and the team. Drop in to the store or shop online at PASTOUTDOORS.COM WILD & CO LEGEND EXPEDITION RACE Feats of epic endurance. Pulling together when everything falls apart. Pushing on when everything in you wants to hit the emergency button. Helping your mates and pushing to the edge of what’s possible. Discover what you’re made of –…