What’s not visible in Jacob’s pack (as we cross Franz Josef Glacier on our traverse of NZ’s Southern Alps) speaks volumes: a packraft, paddle, and PFD. They’re all are nested inside, but you’d never know it from looking at his kit. The rest of our team carried smaller packs with paddling gear strapped everywhere—quite peculiar looking indeed! We jokingly referred to our expedition (and pitched the project to certain clients as) “The Junkshow”. You’d know it from looking at Ryan, Leigh or me—but Jacob was always dialed!…
“June 22nd is World Hypothermia Day.” TB (In response to Wild’s Facebook posting about June 21st being World Naked Hiking Day.) John’s Letter of the Issue wins a Hydra-Light Utility Lantern, valued at $59.95. Powered by the HC2D power cell, the lantern has been designed to fit into a pocket on the side of a pack. The HC2D will give the lantern in excess of 300 hours of continuous light if dipped regularly. Includes 1x HC2D HydraCell. He also wins a year’s subscription to Wild. SEND US YOUR LETTERS TO WIN! Each ‘Letter of the Issue’ wins a piece of quality outdoor kit and A YEAR’S SUBSCRIPTION TO WILD. To be in the running, send your 50-500 word letters to contact@wild.com.au…
Since this column’s inception, I’ve discussed many issues that outdoor gear manufacturers have been addressing, or should have been addressing, to assuage consumer’s concerns about their environmental impact. I have done a lot of research into each brand’s awareness and actions, and taken them at their word, be that on their websites, literature, swing tags or directly from their representatives’ mouths. Most of the time I believe them to have been honest with me, but sadly this isn’t always the case in business. Greenwashing is a term describing the spurious spin used by unscrupulous companies to convince consumers their practices are environmentally friendly, when in fact they are anything but. Outdoor clothing brands are as savvy as any other when considering their customers’ desires, and have even more reason to…
With perhaps fewer than a thousand individuals left in the wild, the plains-wanderer (Pedionomus torquatus) is one of Australia’s most significant and endangered bird species. Historically, the plains-wanderer could once be found over a huge territory, ranging from Victoria to Queensland, but today exists only in a tiny fraction of that. In eastern New South Wales, southwestern Victoria and southeastern South Australia, the bird is effectively extinct. Recent work on the species, led by Bush Heritage Australia, has focused on identifying and protecting remaining populations at two sites: Boolcoomatta in South Australia and Pullen Pullen in Queensland. In particular, the Boolcoomatta site—a 63,000ha reserve 100km west of Broken Hill purchased in 2006 by Bush Heritage—drew media interest when, late last year, a team of researchers set up 30 ‘song meters’…
Growing up in Lithuania in the 1930s, Olegas Truchanas was no stranger to hardship. He fought with the Lithuanian Resistance Movement during World War II, and was one of many Lithuanian youths who left their country when it was handed over to the USSR at the end of the war. Olegas’ intention was to return to Lithuania when the political situation settled down, but this never happened. He remained in Germany to study Law at the University of Munich. One time he swam across the Isa River in winter, dodging ice floes, to win a bet and a loaf of bread. He migrated to Tasmania from Europe in 1948, where he became entranced by the island’s wild and rugged beauty. Like so many before him, he sought solace in nature…
I was disappointed. There had been no blood, and no tears. No slashes, grazes, stings or falls. No leeches. No sliding around on plunging tracks smeared with slick mud. No scrub or vines or jungle so thick we needed the machetes we did not possess. No writhing around in such pain that either of us ever contemplated putting ourselves out of our misery. And there had no geographical miscalculations, let alone getting comprehensively lost. Everything I had come here expecting to find had not come to pass. It was, as I said, disappointing. I, or rather we if I include my walking buddy Barts (aka Paul Bartels), had come to southeast Queensland’s Main Range National Park in search of adventure. We were here to undertake a two-day circuit of the…
The wind is so strong, so goddam loud, that I can’t even hear myself gasping for air. My hood flaps and slaps against my face as the wind tries to tear the clothing right off my body. A constant barrage of frozen icy pellets batters my clothing. My nose and cheeks, the only exposed part of my body, sting in the freezing conditions, although both are fast going numb in the biting cold. And all around it is pitch black, save for our headlamps, trying desperately to illuminate the way ahead. But all I can see is a swirling wall of white. I pull my head further back into my hood. The temperature has plunged below -15C, but with this gale, the windchill must be twice as cold. My headlamp…
Deep within a pristine sandstone canyon in the Northern Territory’s Top End—where cool waters flow beneath ancient, rocky ramparts—lies a hidden gem: Butterfly Gorge. But while the gorge is stunning in its own right, it’s also a superb place to climb, a bounty of steep, outstanding, highly-featured rock. Despite this, established routes are few. By all indications, much of it remains unclimbed. The location is remote and committing, requiring a 4WD for access. But even the final approach on foot is an undertaking in its own right. This is definitely not a casual, short walk-in sport climbing crag. Rather, this is adventure climbing at its finest. Climbing here is both exploratory and a proper quest. It calls for an experienced party who doesn’t mind some tricky route finding. The abilities…
The first thing I noticed about the Exped Synmat was its appearance: bright orange and tiny. I know size isn’t everything, but the mat isn’t much bigger than a 1L Nalgene bottle. (The supplied bag is 1.7L in capacity but long and skinny—its packed size is 24 x 10cm.) It’s light too, weighing in at 535g with all the necessary bits. The ‘necessary bits’ is where it gets different. The Synmat comes with the snappily named (especially if said with a German accent) Schnozzel Pumpbag—basically a large ultra-lightweight stuff sack with a drybag fastening at the top, ending in a long tentacle with a plastic valve. This clicks into a matching valve on the mat and you’re ready to inflate. With a graceful wave or two of the pumpbag you…
by Adrian Hayes (Pen & Sword Publishing, RRP: $29.99) Back in the day—and that day wasn’t that long ago—the ultimate achievement for any mountaineer was standing on Everest’s summit. And while Everest still remains high on many mountaineers’ bucket lists, the over-commercialisation and the ever-decreasing skill levels of would-be summitters has shifted mountaineering’s holy grails to other nearby eight-thousanders. Increasingly the mountain of choice for real mountaineers wanting to achieve the ultimate goal is the world’s second highest mountain, K2. At least that’s the sense I get from reading Adrian Hayes account of his two attempts at the mountain. Hayes has forged a career out of being an adventurer. He’s climbed Everest, reached the North and South Poles (and not just the last degree, he states emphatically), crossed Greenland by…
It is easy—and sometimes, it seems, only sensible—to be negative when we look at the environmental issues facing us today. The big ones—climate change, native species loss, old growth logging, deforestation, Adani, etc—scarcely need repeating. Less noticed, perhaps, is the consistent erosion of our already protected areas: Hunting in NSW reserves; ‘eco’ lodges at Lake Malbena in Tasmania; the encroaching commercialisation of our national parks. Now, there’s no denying that the argument for conservation has long been bolstered by the fact more dollars can be made—and more jobs created—by tourism rather than logging, but that doesn’t mean our parks should be open slather. Encourage more people into the bush, of course, but so too is it necessary to keep access to some of our nation’s most beautiful places difficult, inaccessible,…
Canon 5D MKIII, 16-35 f2.8L II, f8, 1/1000, ISO 200 Canon 6D, EF 24-105mm f4L, f11, 1/1000, ISO 320 Canon 5D Mark IV, 17-40 mm f/4L, f5.6, 1/400, ISO 200 Nikon D3S, 200mm, f5.6, 1/250, ISO 200 Canon 5D MKIII, 70-200 f2.8L II, f4.5, 1/640, ISO 640…
An Anzac Day story about a surviving WW2 veteran mentioned how much change he’d seen during his lifetime. It led me to thinking of the changes that have occurred in my own life so far, and resurrected comments my late father made on the subject. He was born at the end of the nineteenth century. It was still the age of steam, and horses dominated city streets. He then saw the rapid transition to the internal combustion engine, the meteoric rise of aviation from nothing to landings on the moon, and the upheavals of two world wars in which he served. I came along roughly when the transistor and integrated circuit revolution was born. But it took some time to really take off. At school I loved my slide rule…
In 1979, environmental history was made when blockaders, after five years of campaigning, were forced to engage in direct action to halt logging at Terania Creek. It was a campaign that has long lacked the recognition it deserved, despite changing the nature of environmental activism globally. Forty years ago, on August 16, 1979, a motorbike rider negotiated a rough dirt track through lush, steep rainforest near Terania Creek in northern New South Wales, not far from the Queensland border. It was a ride that would change history. There was no direct precedence, at least in the Western world, for what was about to occur. He overtook a lumbering bulldozer crawling down the track and sped off to a field next to the forest where a couple of hundred people had…
The silence was deafening until an avalanche overhead startled me out of an emotionally-repressed stupor. I barely bothered looking up. The sun was out and the mountains had been crumbling around us all day, but the valley we were in was relatively safe. The slide paths that reached down to us made for better walking than the near-infinite “baby-head” boulders which comprised the rest of the route and threatened to break our ankles. I hated that valley and loathed every step, but moving forward was our only way out. We were a day shy of finishing our expedition; there was no going back the way we’d come. Despite how desperately we wanted to be done, the end couldn’t have felt further away. Crushed by the weight of our gargantuan packs,…
They call it Scandinavian summer—a mixture of overcast grey, drizzling rain and long warm days of “midnight sun”. But when the clouds and rain drift away, and all that’s left are the long warm days, summer above the Arctic Circle may be hard to beat. The problem is, in northern Norway those days are few. Although the last ice-age finished thousands of years ago and the ice withdrew—like the rest of Scandinavia, it once covered the country completely—cool, moist weather never left for good. So when summer took a turn toward warm sunshine, and an opportunity arose to visit an old friend who’d recently established his own guiding company in the northern Norwegian town of Narvik, a couple hundred kilometres north of the Arctic Circle, I knew I had to…
The plane approach to Maui reveals the trifold topography of Hawaii’s second largest island: a mountain so green Australia can only envy; dry, brown lowlands with a rash of buildings; then another, even bigger mountain, so large it both dominates the entire island and demands its own weather pattern—Haleakalā (The House of the Sun). The 3055m dormant volcano and its surrounding national park is a magnet for adventure-seekers wanting out-of-this-world hiking, with walks ranging from gentle strolls on jungly but well-defined trails, to rigorous overnight hikes in a lunar landscape. But it’s equally attractive to nature lovers; more endangered species live in Haleakalā than any other US national park. Spreading from summit to sea, the park’s 135 square kilometres host multiple natural ecosystems, with more than 300 plant species endemic…
Sometimes you don’t know a bit of gear isn’t performing as well as it could until someone makes something better. It’s a discovery more women are making as they switch to gear specifically designed for them. It’s easy to see why we tailor things like climbing pants and backpacks to women. But the question is—what other gear can benefit from the ‘gendered treatment’? According to Sea To Summit, it’s sleeping mats. But there is sound science here. Women typically sleep a few degrees colder than men, a result of different metabolisms. And guess what? Women have different shapes, too. Traditionally, however, mats have been designed to accommodate men’s physiques. While as lightweight and compact as their unisex mats, Sea To Summit’s new women’s specific range has trimmed extra length in…
It was the early 1970s, and Bo Hilleberg—a Swedish forester who’d just established a company to sell forestry equipment—was facing what was, in his words, “a huge flop”: his first tent. Hilleberg had been in the forestry game for some years now, but soon after starting his company he realised he wanted to turn to what he knew and loved—the outdoor life. And that meant camping. He’d grown up in Sweden with a forest out his back door. He spent as much time in it as possible, fascinated by the seasons, listening to the wind and howling foxes. And he read stories of adventurers and explorers; it seemed natural to him to become a forester. But military service was compulsory in Sweden at the time, and so Hilleberg was sent…
GETTING SCHOOLED The Nov-Dec 2018 Wild editorial speaks eloquently of ‘educating others about the best way of caring for nature’ and the need to ‘make sure our own education is up to date’. There is good advice, too, in columns in this issue by Tim Macartney-Snape and Bob Brown on specific aspects of acquiring that education. But then there was a caption to a photograph (p 21) of ‘a riverside camp in a beautiful canyon’ in the Herbert River area, Queensland. It shows the very un-beautiful debris of a campfire. An ugly pile of carbonised litter, irresponsibly left behind in what was a beautiful canyon. We need to ask why we might take lighting a fire for granted. Self-education begins by asking, “Do I really need this fire?” A common…
Jen coiled the rope as we looked out over the valley. It was deep, steep, thick with trees and rimmed with the sandstone cliffs of the Blue Mountains. The thin winter light was taking on a golden hue and talk turned to our next decision: home or the pub? It had been one of those magical days of sunshine and flow. We’d started late but found the base of the climb easily, swapping smooth leads up its 250-odd metres. The rock was solid, the climbing fun, well-protected and exposed enough to showcase the view. There’d been minimal faffing: nothing got stuck, dropped, lost or forgotten. It was a day that unrolled as it was supposed to, without unexpected bumps, troughs or terrifying spikes. Twenty minutes later I was dangling in…
Many people think that Guatam Adani opening up the Galilee Basin’s huge coal lode will mean nothing to them or their locality, but those who think so are wrong. Adani’s mine opens the way for six more mega-mines in the basin. These will double Australia’s current greenhouse gas output, already at a record high, and accelerate the global climate crisis which, in recent weeks, took hundreds of lives in heat-stricken India. Adani has downsized his thermal coal mine from 60 to 10 mega tonnes per annum, but the approvals allow him to go back to 60 anytime. Slow or fast, he intends to extract every ounce of coal from the deposit, export it, burn it and shove the greenhouse gases into Earth’s finite atmosphere. But Guatam Adani will pay zip…
Clouds rolled in over Gertrude Saddle, settling into a gentle meander across the Upper Hollyford Valley. The peaks of the Darran Mountains in New Zealand’s South Island towered above, capped with snow and the promise of adventure. Cold rain spattered against the glass windows of Homer Hut, windows that perfectly framed the mountain range above. This was my second visit to the alpine sanctuary. Sitting there taking in the view, I confirmed my suspicions that Homer Hut was the most peaceful place I’d ever been. The cheeky cries of the kea echoed across the valley and the fireplace crackled. Climbers from all walks of life frothed over the countless routes chronicled in well-worn, handwritten journals—gateways to the real adventure of climbing in the Darrans. I was exhausted, having recently finished…
Craggy and rocky, the Du Cane Range is one of Tasmania’s highest mountain chains. I’ve been there many times, and often mused on the potential for a truly alpine traverse under appropriate wintry conditions. It’s a time of year I love in the Tasmanian highlands, when mountain travel brings both challenge and solitude. But the opportunities are rare, and it usually involves watching for the stable weather windows that sometimes follow clearing southwesterly storms. It also frequently means walking in during bad weather to be in the mountains at the best time. My six-day trip started and finished by kayaking 14km through squalls up a rough and very cold Lake St Clair (the bad weather that bookended this particular fine spell). This was challenging, but getting to the tree-line is…
When John Kraefft emerged onto a thin sliver of sandstone cliff, deep in the Budawang Range, his escape from its dense heath was only temporary. It’s one of those places where progress is measured in metres. John—a lanky, experienced bushwalker—and his party had been off route for hours. They were low on water and exhausted by the struggle through thick swathes of banksia, hakea and melaleuca—a who’s who of Australian shrubs. Their attempt to traverse Hollands Gorge, a rainforest-lined corridor that links Folly Point and Mt Tarn in the northern part of the range, had gone awry. The gorge, now cast in shadow, lay somewhere to the south west. In twilight, they pitched tents and sucked whatever water they could from a seepage. Tomorrow, they had to head back into…
With idyllic waterfront campsites and white sand beaches spread the length of an extensive network of interconnected lakes and rivers, Myall Lakes National Park is a perfect destination for multi-day kayaking and canoeing adventures. Just a few hours’ drive north of Sydney, the park protects the largest, natural, fresh-brackish water system on the NSW coast. It is listed as a wetland of international importance and contains more than 10,000 hectares of waterways. The park also protects an astonishing variety of coastal ecosystems. Giant sand dunes can be found at Dark Point. At Mungo Brush, stands of lush rainforest are thick with beautiful cabbage tree palms. And on the park’s western edge towers NSW’s tallest tree: the Grandis, a giant flooded gum. Overlay this with the scenic beauty of the lakes—where…
Winter is here but that doesn’t mean you should stop hitting the singletrack. Nor does it mean that when you’re out there you’re not getting thirsty, so Osprey has just launched their 2019 winter range of MTB hydration packs. It not only sees a full revamp of their popular top-end Raptor (men’s) and Raven (women’s) packs, but the launch of three new hydration pack series. New for the updated Raptor and Raven packs—Osprey’s most fully-featured hydration packs, available in either 10 or 14-litre capacities—are freshly designed bike-specific, wing-shaped contouring harnesses. The new design maximises stability and helps distribute weight evenly, all the while preventing pinching. A new lightweight sternum strap magnet attachment also means you’re not fumbling for the mouthpiece when you need it quickly. Of the three completely new…
Previously renowned for their maximalist running shoes, Hoka fans should be pleased to learn they also have a small range of full-height hiking boots, and by ‘small’ I mean (in Australia at least) a single pair—the Sky Kaha. (There are two further mid-height boots in the Sky series, however; the Arkali and the Toa). Looking like an update of last season’s Tor Ultra Hi, the Sky Kaha follows Hoka’s original principles of mega-cushioning, exaggerated heel and toe rockers, and a mini Formula One bucket seat for each foot. This boot is to hiking what vibrating waterbeds are to love hotels. Somewhat appropriately (‘Hoka One One’ is Māori for ‘time to fly’, and ‘Kaha’ their word for ‘strong and capable’), I tested this pair on a two-day tramp across the beautiful…
Ryan, Lilly and myself all set out bright and early for a day exploring River Caves and Tiger Snake Canyons, a dry canyoning combo that boasts stunning rainforest, “gorge-ous” views and an awesome mix of abseils. The photo above sees me making faces while I figure out how to tackle the first tight squeeze into Tiger Snake without donating too much skin to the “cheese-grater” (as Ryan so aptly named this section).Hayden Sattler, Newcastle, NSW SEND US YOUR WILD SHOT TO WIN GREAT GEAR! For a chance to win some quality outdoor kit, send your WILD SHOT and a 50-100 word caption to contact@wild.com.au…
