Table of contents for Issue 194, Summer 2024 in Wild

After our descent of the Crossing and Davey Rivers in Southwest Tasmania, the most logical onward route back towards civilisation was to continue using our aquatic transport across the open waters of Port Davey. Packrafts aren’t ideal for seafaring, however, and are very susceptible to wind and waves. Where possible, near-shore paddling felt safer, and was certainly more scenic, but swell rebound and surf occasionally proved a bit exciting. Here, David Bowman is caught by an unexpected wave. by GRANT DIXON Simon Sharples about to drop into Danae Brook’s ‘chockstone’ abseil. The chockstone isn’t actually the huge one at the top of the image; it’s another one halfway down the abseil, and it’s infamous for catching ropes. Danae is certainly a place that makes it worthwhile to bring the fisheye…

As Australians face the disruption and decline of their natural environment, as they suffer the consequences of the climate and biodiversity crises, as they pay heed to the alarm rung by UN Secretary-General António Guterres (who has called on world leaders to change course and end a “senseless and suicidal war against nature”), as the state of the planet rapidly deteriorates due to human destruction, and as legislators refuse to take action while greenhouse-gas emissions climb to record highs, citizens around the country have continued the long tradition of protesting to defend the environment. In response, Liberal and Labor state governments across Australia have—instead of taking real action to save us and our fellow species in this time of planetary crisis—passed and enacted draconian anti-protest laws. This is an irresponsible…

It’s a Tuesday in April when I meet Ya at Sydney’s Circular Quay. She’s dressed as described in her message: cream work shorts, grey/brown striped shirt, a green messenger bag slung over one shoulder. “Looks like I’m from the country!” is the final detail in her text, and she does, in all those subtle ways. She strides rather than walks. There’s a broad generosity in how she smiles and laughs. She exudes friendliness, capability and action. Her four days in Sydney are crammed: She’s renewed her passport at the German consulate; gone on long coastal runs with mates; and had a job interview with the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD). After our interview, she’s meeting with her publisher, Ultimo Press, to pitch her second novel. The next nine days won’t ease…

CLIMBING THE 4,000M PEAKS of the European Alps is one of the great and enduring challenges in mountaineering. These summits are no doubt some of the most accessible in the world, with an unrivalled network of lifts, paths and refuges that provide simple logistics, at least to reach the base of the mountain. However, many of the standard routes to these summits remain serious and technical endeavours, requiring stamina, courage, skill, and humility. As a photographer in these mountains, the higher you are, the better the light seems to get. The 4,000m peaks are the first things to catch the morning rays, and for me, that gives the most sumptuous light to work with. But that often means getting up exceptionally early. While most people start early in the mountains,…

My mission was to find ataraxia. It is not a planet or a solar system, or a spot on a map; ataraxia—a key component of Ancient Greek philosophy—is a place of peace, a mental state of equanimity and tranquillity you carry inside you. But despite any quest for ataraxia being essentially internal, physical locations matter too, and I suspected the south-west extremity of Tasmania—beaches, bites and the Southern Ocean’s tempestuousness—could well be cradling what I desired. You see, ataraxia, like all things precious, tends to be of greater magnitude when hurdles need to be overcome before claiming it. One of those obstacles, ironically enough in this case, being anxiety. On Mt Karamu, close to SW Tassie’s tippiest tip, on Day Four of my circumnavigation of the South West Cape circuit,…

The mountainsides beyond the Routeburn Shelter course with clear water. It cascades down in threads and rivulets and torrents, flowing white against the dark grey face of the mountains. New Zealand’s South Island is what I imagine much of Earth felt like before we paved and overpopulated it, pursuing our suicidal dream of endless growth. It is Edenic, virginal, almost perfect. The water flowing off the mountains’ flanks is so pure that you can dip your lips to it and drink, unworried about the poisons of progress. This is the draw of the Five Passes trek, five days of off-trail back-country hiking existing—for a time—outside of what the poet Wallace Stevens called “this hacked-up world of tools”. Yet it is also true that I’ve been drawn here by the siren…

DAY 1 Tooma Rd Car Park to Derschko’s Hut 14.1km; approx 4 hours From the car park, set off past the barrier, and a second one a few hundred metres later, as the fire trail heads over a hillock then down to a T-junction (1.4km). The ruins of Round Mountain Hut are about 500m down the road to the left, and are a convenient place to set up camp if you’re arriving late at night. This is also the trail on which you’ll return; see you in a couple of days! Round Mountain itself lies to the right, and the eponymous trail curves around between it and the Tumut River valley, leading gently downhill to a small creek (1.9km). Round Mountain looms above your right shoulder while views of Jagungal…

This boot started to fall apart within twenty minutes of landing in the Carr Boyd Ranges in the East Kimberley, necessitating many, many repair stops where it was sewn (breaking two sailcloth needles), cable-tied, and accessory-corded over the length of several days. (Ed: This boot looks like it’s seen a helluva lot of good times! And that you’ve got a helluva lot of knot-tying ingenuity!) Steve wins an awesome Nemo Equipment MOONLITE reclining camp chair valued at $249.95. The chair brings comfort to the backcountry, and is barely noticeable in your pack. A unique pulley system allows you to adjust your sitting position on the fly, and oversized tubes create exceptional strength and stability despite the chair’s light weight. nemoequipment.com SEND US YOUR WILD SHOT TO WIN GREAT GEAR!…

[Letter of the Issue] MAIN RANGE CANYONING Hello James, In October 2023, on a combined canyoning and ski weekend to Tuross Falls in Wadbilliga National Park followed by some chutes at Club Lake in Kosciuszko NP, Kev said to Ned: “I’ve got a brilliant idea. Let’s canyon Lady Northcotes Falls … it’ll take three days … we can stay at Opera House Hut … easy weekend trip.” So in March 2024, our packs loaded with wetsuits, ropes, food and gear for three days, seven of us set off from Charlotte Pass for what would be more bush-bashing, more spectacular views and less hydration than we could imagine. “Let’s make our approach via the Sentinel” suggested Rosie in the week preceding. The western face proved to be quite the bash, and…

The South Coast Track, like so many areas in lutruwita/Tasmania, is a precious place of wilderness. It is an ancient Aboriginal route, a place of rich First Nations’ heritage that reverberates through the sea, the rocks and the sky. It is a jewel of the Southwest, and part of the iconic Tasmanian Wilderness World Heritage Area (TWWHA). It remains a rite of passage to patiently stumble through this wonderful realm with only a tent between yourself and the whip of Southern Ocean weather events. You move from ancient quartzite in the west to younger dolerite in the east, you cross lagoons and rivulets, and you make friends with mud. The journey transforms, is always transforming, and is transformative. It’s a truly special walk, a truly special week. My friends and…

“We have enough hobbies!” That’s what my wife, Martine, tells me when I say I’d like to try bikepacking. It’s an attempted excuse, but I see straight through it; I know the real reason she objects is that the last time she rode a bike—in Germany, while she was on exchange there—she crashed into a traffic-light pole. She’s very talented, my wife. The second reason she provides is that—unlike our mortgage, unfortunately—our house’s remaining storage space is rapidly evaporating. The spare rooms (yes, rooms plural) are already stacked, neatly at least, with all types of adventurous clothing and gear. The way it should be. So too, the shed. “We’ll have to do an extension, then,” I propose. I’m only semi-joking. Martine hadn’t disagreed, however, when I’d suggested previously that we…

From the big-wall granite-climbing mecca of Squamish—a now bustling but until recently sleepy pulp milling town on Howe Sound an hour north of Vancouver, British Columbia—with our harnesses and ropes now stashed in the car, it took a ferry, another ferry, and then yet another ferry, followed by a three-hour drive, a left turn before Tofino, and lastly a one-hour water taxi before we landed at the edge of Pacific Rim National Park on the west coast of Vancouver Island. In front of us lay the Broken Group, which comprises over 100 rock- and tree-covered islands, islets, and rocky outcrops in Barkley Sound. Rich in wildlife on land and sea, it will offer chances to encounter eagles, seals, sea otters, bears, whales, and maybe even the fabled sea wolves of…

THE BLUE MOUNTAINS, A COUPLE OF HOURS drive west of Sydney, contains the highest concentration of easily accessible slot canyons anywhere in Australia. These narrow gorges have been carved out by water over hundreds of thousands of years, cutting through the sandstone of the uplifted plateau to form amazing sculpted formations, with scalloped walls curving up to the sky. In the middle of the day, sunbeams light up the canyon walls. While the Blue Mountains receives over four-million visitors a year, few of them venture into the canyons. Of those that get close, most will be watching abseilers descend Empress Falls, or will be wandering the Grand Canyon Track, which follows the rim of the canyon for hundreds of metres, with the occasional glimpse into the chasm below. Getting into…

THERE ARE FEW TENTS MORE ICONIC than MSR’s venerable Hubba Hubba. I think I bought my first (yes, I’ve bought more than one) back in 2004. They were lightweight (sub 2kg), but more importantly, thanks to their innovative pole design, they had absolutely loads of liveable space and headroom, and roomy vestibules too. It truly says something about just how groundbreaking the design was that—not only are these tents still around twenty years on—the key aspects of their design remain unchanged. But not everything remains the same. New materials allowed the NX series of the Hubba Hubba (introduced in 2014) to shave weight further still. And this year, 2024, has seen a new iteration: the Hubba Hubba Bikepack. The regular version of the Hubba Hubba has always been popular with…

We get it; we know ads aren’t the primary reason you read Wild. But without our supporters, Wild simply wouldn’t exist*. If you love what we’re on about here at Wild, if you’re passionate about both adventure and protecting our natural heritage, if having a magazine that’s full of well-written, crafted stories means something to you, a magazine that fights hard for our environment, then support our supporters; without them, Wild wouldn’t exist. We know that our advertising supporters aren’t, of course, your only options when it comes to choosing what gear you purchase. But if you’re in a situation where you have a few cool options to choose from, and one of them happens to be from one of our advertisers, then show them their support means something by choosing…

One of my very favourite books over the last decade has been Robert Moor’s On Trails. My copy is beaten up and dog-eared and almost floppy and soft after having been taken out on so many walks as my reading material. Moor is a fabulous, thoughtful, erudite writer whose flowy prose makes reading the deep topics he tackles—natural history, science, philosophy—an effortless joy. As I said, the book is dog-eared, made worse by the fact that whenever I hit an interesting point, I’ve folded the page corner to mark it. There are many folded corners. And one of them is to mark a passage I’ve been thinking a lot about in the last two weeks, a passage about modern trail-building philosophy, at least as it relates to the US. I’ll…

DAMN THE DAM WORKS lutruwita With Lake Pedder sited on an active fault line, the Tasmanian Government is about to spend $150 million strengthening the dam. A better solution would be removing the dam entirely. Lake Pedder is currently held by three ageing dams classified as “high risk” due to their location on an active fault line. After years of resistance, Hydro Tasmania has finally released flood-risk mapping data through a freedom of information inquiry. The results are alarming: If an earthquake were to occur, the dams could fail, triggering a catastrophic flood that would devastate downstream communities. While the chance of this happening in any given year is 1 in 10,000, this risk is not insignificant in today’s world of increasing natural disasters. The question is not if but…

The end of our 19-day walk is literally in sight, the final deep valley of Salisbury Waters stretches westwards. Up there, in the darkness of its towering, rugged headwaters, is a small walking track that threads its way out of this gorge and onto the plateau above. To reach the track, however, we must negotiate the swollen river at our feet. Crossings—five so far today and 51 on the trip to date—are becoming increasingly difficult. Several times, the riverside cliffs force us towards uncrossable rapids, and so we clamber up and over bluffs and knolls, crawl through trees and over slippery boulders in an effort to continue our journey upstream. Now, an unsurpassable cliff forces us to backtrack to our lunch spot where fatigue makes our choice of crossing point less…

Going up mountains is something I’ve always done. I’d pore over a map deciding which peak to choose and by setting my sights on a particular peak, I would be selecting the country I’d visit and the region within that country I’d travel to. This process meant that it wasn’t just about reaching the summit; it was about being immersed in the landscape and culture that the area around the mountain had to offer. The climb facilitated the adventure. Each mountain has its own stories, and I left with new ones—new terrain explored, new people met, and new insights into the world. But recently I’ve become a little disillusioned with where mountain climbing seems to be going. The images of the long summit queues on Everest (and increasingly others) are…

THERE ARE NO TWO WAYS ABOUT IT—Jagungal is a stone-cold Aussie-bushwalking classic. It’s not the most difficult, nor is it uniquely picturesque, and the wildlife can be shy, but it offers the quintessential Snowy Mountains experience. Expect rolling alpine plains, deep river valleys, skeletal snow gums, bubbling creeks and charismatic huts. Evidence of the Ngarigo people’s presence in the Snowy Mountains, including in the Jagungal Wilderness, dates back many thousands of years, with estimates varying from 7,000 to over 20,000. They came during the summer months to harvest Bogong moths, when it was easy to scrape them from the rocks onto which the moths had settled for their aestivation phase (a summer version of hibernation). They could then be roasted in a fire or ground into a paste to be…

“The Makalus took everything I threw at them in their stride.” I’M A SELF-CONFESSED, hiking-pole convert. I used to hate the damn things, would actively scorn them, and swore black and blue I’d never be seen wielding them. But my knees had other ideas, and eventually forced me to backflip. If only I’d become acquainted with the Leki Makalu FX Carbon poles earlier, I would’ve switched allegiances much sooner. And BTW, my knees are great now, and I still use the poles, because I’ve learnt how useful it is to have four points of stibility, bung knees or not. Straight out of the plastic, the slick design of the Leki Makalus oozes quality. All for show, though? To answer this question, I set out on a 70km walk traversing some…