Tabla de contenidos para April-May 2024 en Great Walks

I’M about to go under the knife. Again. Unfortunately due to my fair Celtic skin – and the fact that when I was a kid being ‘SunSmart’ wasn’t a thing – I’m constantly having suspect moles cut out. The one I’m about to have removed just below my left eye is a nasty Squamous Cell Carcinoma (SCC). There are three main types of skin cancer: Basal Cell Carcinoma (BCC), that’s the most common one, then SCC and then Melanoma (that one can be deadly). I’ve had all three. Fortunately I regularly check my skin so I know if there are any moles that need to be looked at by an expert. It all started in 2009 when I noticed one on my chest had changed colour. My doctor cut it…

THE Grand Cliff Top Walk is a scenic 19km/two-day walk linking Wentworth Falls, Leura and Katoomba. Walkers will be able to stop and enjoy a night in a mountain village, choosing from a variety of accommodation options, and complete the track the following day. Great Walks was lucky to do the walk just before its official opening plus we took five with Tim Lanyon, Principal Project Officer, Blue Mountains Branch, NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service (see pg 89) Day 1: Wentworth Falls to Leura – 11km As the 8.12 am train from Central lumbers into Wentworth Falls Station, school students shoulder heavy backpacks for their day ahead. Swinging mine into place, relieved to feel the floatiness that comes from a light day pack, there’s a jaunt in my step…

RENJO WINS A YETI YONDER 1L BOTTLE WORTH $42.95! THIS MONTH’S WINNING PHOTO Nayband historical town, Tabas, Iran Parisa Bajelan, Iran Camera: Canon 6D Parisa: “In the heart of the Lut Desert, a lone mud brick building stands atop a hill in Nayband town. Its triangular eco-designed windows glowing with a warm, inviting light. As the stars emerge, twinkling like diamonds against the inky sky, a Geminid meteor streaks across the heavens, leaving a trail of brilliance. The air is crisp and cool, filled with the scent of sand, palm dates, and orange, as the silence of the desert is broken only by the soft rustle of the wind. Bathed in the gentle glow of the lantern and the starlit sky, one feels a sense of awe and wonder at…

THE northern road out of Kathmandu climbs quickly out of the city smog. Our Jeep swings around switchbacks, overtakes colourful trucks on blind corners, brushes past dust-covered foliage. The seatbelts don’t work and neither does the air-con. I drop the window to get some cool air and inhale a lungful of cool road dust instead. There’s too much motion to read. I idly wonder if this is what it’s like to sit inside a washing machine. I’m heading to the Langtang Valley, which rises eastwards from one of the main north-south routes through the Himalaya. It is a remote place. Huge walls of metamorphic rock and granite, hundreds of metres high, are overhung with masses of snow and ice. There is no road access – only one trail leads in…

HEXATREK, FRANCE In May 2022, at the age of 55, Kiwi journalist Claire McCall and her partner James set off to attempt four stages of the Hexatrek, a new 3034km high-level hike in France. In this excerpt from ‘Hiking the Hexa’, Claire ponders whether she’s cut out to be a mountain woman… THERE are no flat sections in the Alps. Well, that’s what it feels like. You’d think this might have occurred to me before I signed up to this challenge. It sounds naive — and it is. James, to his credit, did try to warn me when I first mentioned crossing the Vosges and the Alps as an alternative to tackling the Pacific Crest Trail in the States, but I am a creative at heart, so I pushed aside…

WOG Wog Campground from the Braidwood direction is the usual access point for the Corang area of the Budawangs in southern NSW. It’s a spectacular area where the walking is somewhat easier than other areas such as the Castle and Monolith Valley, but the reward is high. One of the main highlights is Corang Arch where a return journey can easily be achieved by a day hike or through a multi-day hike extending the experience into the Mt Tarn area and beyond, to join into the Monolith Valley area, or to do a loop to include the Corang River area. I love walking in this area along the thin walking tracks with minimal scrubby areas and mostly open expanse. There are many viewpoints that show other parts of the Budawangs…

WHERE NEXT? THORSBORNE TRAIL, HINCHINBROOK ISLAND, QLD The 32km Thorsborne Trail on Munamudanamy/Hinchinbrook Island, FNQ has been around for years but soon they’ll be an extra experiences for this challenging tropical hike. The Thorsborne Trail Enhancement Project will see facilities upgraded, the number of daily visitors to the island increase, and from 2025 bushwalkers will have the chance to trek this four-day walk guided with a Traditional Owner. The commercially guided tours aim to preserve the qualities of an independent hiker’s experience of this national park island, while deepening their cultural understanding of it. Hinchinbrook Island is renowned for its habitats. Its extensive mangrove forests are among the richest and most diverse in Australia. They are important breeding grounds for many marine animals. Other habitats include saltpans, eucalypt forest, rainforest,…

THE Stirling Ranges are one of the most notable mountain ranges in Western Australia and arguably the most accessible due to their close proximity to Perth, located 337km southeast of the city. This makes for a hiker’s paradise, with six trailed peaks to summit, alongside the premier two-day Stirling Ridge Walk. Formed over millions of years as layers of sediment rose from the seabed, this is one of my favourite places in Western Australia and these are the stories of the mountains I’ve climbed so far! Mt Hassell Mt Hassell is one of the six peaks in the Stirling Range National Park. This 847m peak is less daunting than the other hikes, climbing just 430m over 1.5km. The perfect track if you are looking to push yourself out of your…

IN April 2023, we completed our ambitious project, “Project Base8000”. The goal was to trek to the base camps of all 14 of the world’s highest mountains over 8,000 metres – “the 8000ers”. This took us to the remote heart of the Himalayas and the Karakoram ranges across Nepal, Tibet and Pakistan. Faced with challenges of remoteness, logistics, weather and interruptions due to the COVID-19 pandemic, it was undoubtedly a test of our physical toughness and mental fortitude. We discovered some of the most challenging and breathtaking landscapes – with altitude and attitude! “THE NEXT TEST WAS ADJUSTING TO BASIC LIFE IN TENTS AND TEAHOUSES” Starting out Coming from the lands of kangaroos and kiwis, we’d always loved travelling the world. But it was the Himalayas that captivated us more…

THE only Japanese force to land in Australia during WWII was a small reconnaissance party that arrived in northern WA’s Kimberley region on 19 January 1944, to investigate reports of the Allies building large bases there. The party consisted of four officers on a fishing boat. They investigated the York Sound region for a day and a night before returning to their base on Timor. Upon returning to Japan in February, the junior officer who commanded the party suggested using 200 Japanese prison inmates to launch a guerrilla campaign in Australia. Nothing came of this as it’s likely the officer’s seniors looked at a map of the Kimberley and after realising it was three times the size of England, filled with deep gorges, miles of desert plains and rocky wilderness,…

TRAIL RUNNERS HERE in the antipodes, we’re sometimes a little slow to catch on to new hiking gear trends. For instance, many of our Northern Hemisphere trail buddies have been utilising trail running shoes in place of boots for years now, especially the ultralight and thru-hiking communities. Full-leather, high-top boots are an endangered species up there, and slowly but surely, many on the Australian scene are starting to follow suit. But where’s the ankle support? Where’s the waterproofing? The durability? Yes, there are apparent downsides, but for a lot of people these are compensated for by the benefits: much lighter weight; better sensory feedback; more breathable; quicker drying; no wearing-in period, i.e. general all-round comfort straight out of the box. With the evidence stacking up, Great Walks decided it was…

GREAT DAY WALKSINVERLOCH, VIC THERE’S a stretch of sand where the tide lifts and lowers stories. With each ebb and flow, the passage of time etches in stone and escapes through estuaries. On the rapidly shifting shores of Inverloch, 150km south east of Melbourne, sandbanks stretch long, with stories spanning over 125 million years. Setting out from The Caves carpark at low tide, a story of geological impact, erosion and earthquakes has formed the sandstone caves carved 7000 years ago into the coastline. At the shore platform 100m north of the stairs, a Cretaceous age, larger-than-life dinosaur footprint, solidified in the ancient river bed, swallows our footprints. The Dinosaur Dreaming team spend summer days digging and hammering, diligently uncovering bones from the fossil layer. Flowing outwards, the tide exposes the…

NORTH Queensland Army Captains Monika Georgieva and Wes Walsh have completed the first recorded unsupported traverse of the Australian Alps Walking Track, trekking more than 730km in 19 days, 9 hours and 30 minutes. They had already come a long way before they even started the trek. CAPT Walsh is from South Africa and moved to Australia after finishing school. CAPT Georgieva born in Bulgaria, went to school in UK and moved to Australia aged 18. Both joined the Army soon after their move to Australia and both are currently posted to Lavarack Barracks in Townsville. Their epic walk involved more than two years of planning. On December 8 last year they packed the last of their gear and drove from Canberra to start walking at dawn from a rotunda…

IT started with a casual conversation around the kitchen bench one weekend. In the wake of my stepfather’s passing six months earlier, Mum was navigating her loss and what the future might look like. For over 40 years, Mum and Sid had explored the world together. Mum did not want her travelling days to be over. Our brainstorming session ranged from nature-based retreats to singles’ holidays for over 55, none of which resonated. However, when my husband John and I suggested the Overland Track – a multi-day hike in Tasmania – Mum found herself intrigued. Our crew comprised of John and me in our mid-forties, Mum at 72 and Rita, John’s Mum, at 70. After booking in February, we eagerly awaited our mid-October departure date. Anticipation mounted as we commenced…

THE last person to claim to have seen NZ’s famed giant moa was a seven-year-old girl who lived on Fiordland’s west coast in the late 1800s. Alice McKenzie kept a diary of life in one of NZ’s most remote settlements and in her 1947 memoir she says in 1887 she saw a large blue bird unlike anything she’d seen before. Alice examined its curved feathers and noted it had no tail. When she tried to tie it up the bird grunted, and when it stood up Alice claims it was taller than her. The bird left footprints 28cm long, far too big for any known living bird in NZ. There’s been much doubt about Alice’s sighting but standing on the wind-swept bay, at the end of the Hollyford Track where…

DEBORAH: “The first time we met was on a hike to Tali Karng in the Victorian Alps in 2019. We decided to carpool to the start and basically couldn’t stop talking about the hikes we wanted to do. Tali Karng was a great place to start a friendship that grew from there. It showed us both that we had a passion for hiking, but we also had a lot in common with our personalities. We love to have a laugh but will get serious when needed. After that first hike, it wasn’t long before we did more hikes together, then we started to plan bigger hikes. It was great to have that friend that you could organize this with. We both hiked solo before we met, and I actually don’t…

GREAT ASIAN WALKS OKINAWA, JAPAN THINGS are done a little differently in Okinawa. People are a little different too. ‘We are quite unlike the rest of Japan down here,’ they’ll tell you. ‘Our landscapes, our culture, our food, is really quite different to the rest of Japan,’ they’ll say. Walking too is a little different in Okinawa, one of 160 islands in the prefecture, some 1,600km south of bustling Tokyo. Trails are less formal than the designated hikes in the country’s north. At the heart of Japan’s health food-focused Blue Zone, it’s not uncommon for Okinawans to live to 100 years of age thanks to their predominantly vegetarian/pescetarian diet. It’s also not uncommon to take walks with owners of off-the-trodden-track lodgings and rural restaurants. Call it walking in their shoes.…

I didn’t start hiking until I was 30 when I did the Inca Trail in Peru and fell in love with the outdoors. Since then, my life has pretty much revolved around chasing adventure, which led me to move to the stunning Blue Mountains. When people ask me what I like doing in my spare time, I often reply, “walking slowly away from people”. While I’m fully aware of the benefits of ultralight packing (I tried it once), I’ve accepted my fate as someone who will always choose a little luxury over going faster. I think it stems from the fact that I was born with the competitive bone missing; I’m very happy being blissfully average at everything I try. Hiking, canyoning, skiing, kayaking — for me, it’s all about…

BEHIND THE SCENESTIM LANYON, NPWS GREAT Walks was lucky enough to experience the new Grand Cliff Top Walk in the NSW Blue Mountains (pg 10) and wanting to know more about how this walk was created we had a chat with Tim Lanyon, Principal Project Officer, Blue Mountains Branch, NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service. What’s your earliest bushwalking memory? Ku-ring-gai Chase National Park. I was small, the hills were big and I still go back there every now and then and remember younger days. How did you end up working for NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service and what is your job title? Let’s just say it was a journey. It included walking around Uluru over 100 times and then coming back to NSW where I got a job…

WE all have witnessed events on our hikes which make us wonder why some people venture into the pristine parks and wilderness, only to leave that environment in a worse state. How many times have we witnessed dirty pieces of paper/wipes scattered around viewing points, rubbish stuffed into tree hollows, small tabs/foil/tear-off/lids off packets on the ground at campsites, rubbish crammed down drop toilets etc. Doesn’t it make your blood boil and wonder why aren’t other people more careful, don’t they have a conscience?! It might surprise you to know that WE are all amongst the culprits. Simply by taking a hike we can do these things unknowingly, as much as we try hard not to do so. Who has blown their nose on tissue paper, stuffed it into your…