Table of contents for Issue 177, Spring 2020 in Wild

Letter of the Issue OPTIMISM Hi James, My partner is a long time subscriber to Wild Magazine which I have skimmed through, mostly looking at the photos. Since you have taken over as editor, I have noticed a distinct change in the magazine’s philosophy, encompassing a social, philosophical and political outlook. It no longer is about a narrow perspective but challenges the whole raison d’etre of outdoor activities. The latest edition just blew me away—from your editorial which raised the issue of women, Bob Brown’s contribution on forests and logging, Tim’s suggestion about a one way trail in Nepal, the outdoors and mental health, and so on. I finished (almost) reading the magazine and was left with a feeling of optimism about the future, something I had almost completely lost.…

The exploration of Harwoods Hole marked the birth of alpine caving in New Zealand. Cavers first learned about the huge hole in the ground in December 1957. While having a beer in a pub, Edgar Sixtus bumped into some visiting cavers. “There’s a hole on my neighbours land” he told them, “that’s absolutely bottomless.” He then offered to lead the cavers there. The next day, when the group arrived at the edge, they tossed in a rock. It took six long, long seconds to hit the bottom and for the echo to bounce back. Not quite bottomless, but not far off. The massive shaft, located on Takaka Hill at the top of the South Island, was estimated to be 200m deep. It made it, at that time, the deepest known…

Beneath the star-spent sky the glacier clinging to the face of the cirque high above Valnontey is pale and ghostly and seems almost luminous in the deepening night. The sun dipped below the ridgeline here less than an hour ago, and yet already the ground is rimed in frost as the stars fall endlessly thru the void of the alpine night high above. I’ve not seen another hiker here in Italy’s Gran Paradiso National Park for hours; it’s the shoulder season of mid-October with all the mountain huts shuttered and the Earth still and quiet as a sacred mass all around me. I bow my head a little bit and breathe deeply. A great national park, of course, deserves a great backstory, and the story of Gran Paradiso is perhaps…

LATITUDE 9 minutes USA LATITUDE is a poetic short film that follows four daring young women to the 79th parallel, roughly 1,000km from the North Pole to rediscover themselves amidst Svalbard’s epic arctic ocean sailing, ice mountain climbs, and ski descents. Shelby Dyer, Anna Marno, Brittney Ziebell and Jessica Baker are all former competitive skiers & they revisit what skiing means to them to find a new curiosity and love for a sport they’ve known all their lives. TRANSENDING 10 minutes USA TRANSENDING follows the journey of Erin Parisi as she comes into her own identity as a Transgender woman and trains for the Seven Summits to create awareness and visibility for the Trans community. This is a journey of extensive vulnerability, heartbreak and courage. SEA BIRDS 10 minutes Australia…

CARNARVON NATIONAL PARK This is by far the most popular and extensive Sandstone Wilderness park. It has three distinct sections—Carnarvon Gorge, Mount Moffat and Ka Ka Mundi/Salvatore Rosa—each approached from a different point on the compass. CARNARVON GORGE SECTION Carnarvon Gorge itself is on the park’s eastern edge. Turn off the Great Inland Way, 111km north of Injune or 61km south of Rolleston; it’s 44km on sealed roads to the park entrance. This entrance gives access to the park’s main network of walking tracks, including the Main Gorge Walking Track. This trail takes visitors 10km up Carnarvon Creek and into the heart of the truly spectacular gorge with its towering white sandstone cliffs, groves of bright, lush cabbage tree palms and ancient aboriginal art sites. Along the Main Gorge Walking…

Map data sourced from the LINZ Data Service licensed for reuse under CC BY 4.0 DAY 1 Routeburn Carpark to Theatre Flats 10km (approx. 4-5 hours) The walk starts on the well-trodden Routeburn Track. Before a kilometre is up, however, you’ll have the opportunity to feel smug as you leave behind the throngs of hikers on the Routeburn, and instead turn off to the right onto a steep, faintly-marked trail heading to Sugarloaf Pass (1,154m). You’ll be unlikely to see anyone over the coming days and probably will have the whole landscape to yourself. The 680m ascent to Sugarloaf Pass takes roughly two hours (4km) but it’s worth it; from there, you’ll look upon the beautiful landscape you’ll spend the coming days in. It’s a stunning panorama, and even if…

The history of footwear company HOKA One One (pronounced O-nay O-nay) did not begin with Christopher McDougall’s book Born To Run, but the 2009 bestseller provides a useful vantage point to understand just how different, and how radically disruptive, HOKA has been. McDougall’s book—which is an excellent read BTW, and has sold 3 million copies—was crazily popular at the time, and one of its key tenets was that the running shoes of day were responsible for a myriad of runners injuries; what people needed to do, McDougall said, was switch to barefoot running. It helped launched the minimalist shoe industry. By 2010, minimalist shoes like the Vibram Five Fingers had captured a third of the US running shoe market. Conventional wisdom indicated the growth was unstoppable. But in 2009, the…

Djulpan is a remote beach in Northeast Arnhem Land, around 2.5 hours by 4WD from the nearest town. Stretching for 14km, it should be a pristine haven for wildlife. Tragically, however, this isolated and beautiful stretch of coastline on the western side of the Gulf of Carpentaria is inundated by plastic pollution. The Indigenous Rangers of the Dhimurru Aboriginal Corporation of Northeast Arnhem Land, Northern Territory are responsible for conserving 71km of the rugged and remote coastline. Djulpan—so remote and untouched that the Rangers had to cut a 4WD track to allow access for vehicles and equipment—is a culturally significant place for the Yolgnu traditional owners. The Rangers work tirelessly to care for the country on their behalf, but the quantity of plastic pollution washing up on their sacred cultural…

Standing on the banks of the Snowy River last October, at an idyllic location right at the edge of the snowline and on a day of prefect weather, I was struck by a singular thought: “Where the bloody hell did all these people come from?” It was the day of the 2019 Snowy River Extreme Race, the final stop in the Australian Whitewater Grand Prix, and more than 200 paddlers were competing. For years, however—even while I competed for five years as part of Australia’s whitewater kayak team—I had discounted the Aussie paddling scene. In fact, pretty much since I was 18, I had had little to do with Australian paddling, instead spending as much time abroad as possible. “There’s no water in Oz,” I thought. “And hardly any kayakers.”…

Located north of Canada’s Baffin Island, Bylot Island lies 700km north of the Arctic Circle at the eastern entrance to the famous Northwest Passage. The entire 200km-wide island is a national park with no permanent habitation. Most of the island comprises a network of large and small glaciers winding among ridges and peaks up to almost 2,000m in elevation. When snow-covered, these ice highways provide inviting access to the island’s interior. But when hauling sleds laden with sufficient food, fuel and equipment to survive a month, even near-imperceptible uphill gradients or soft snow can be hard work. Spring is the best time to travel in this way. Snow cover on glacial moraine and mountain ridges is maximised, temperatures are slightly more friendly than winter (although can still drop below -25oC,…

She fell silently. Our distance left us surreally disconnected from the unmitigated violence Steff was experiencing. Bounce… Flip… Bounce… “She’s falling!” As the words left my mouth, I was already sprinting. Hard. Transfixed by the sight of our friend tumbling over rock steps down a sickeningly steep icy chute, we were thrust into the adrenalin-charged chaos of emergency. And while she fell in silence at first, now that quiet was broken by the tinny scratching of crampons in icy snow and the roar of blood in my ears. Easily the longest and most dangerous fall I’ve witnessed, the vision of Steff sliding limply, headfirst out of sight would loop in my mind for weeks. Lungs burning, I raced to reach her, horrified by what I might find. THE PACIFIC CREST…

Born and raised in a poor rural village in Bihar, India, Kopal Goyal left home at a young age because her village didn’t offer schooling beyond Year 8. But after escaping the stifling surroundings of her orthodox family, she began wondering to herself if she was the only one fighting to keep her passion for sports alive, or if there were other girls like her. With many questions on her mind, she went on a journey across India to find women like her and start a dialogue with them. During the journey, she found 13 women practicing 11 different extreme and alternative sports. The resultant film, Project Wild Women, explores her conversations with these women and gives us a glimpse into their lives, and what drives them in a country…

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The North Face has been pushing for some years now to increase the company’s sustainability by focussing on its production of materials, which alone accounts for roughly 60 to 80% of their products’ carbon footprints. There are many ways, of course, to address a product’s sustainability and carbon footprint, but one of the most effective is to simply increase the amount of recycled content used in manufacturing it. But using plastic bottles to create synthetics doesn’t only reduce any given material’s carbon footprint; recycled polyester has fewer impacts on water and air quality than virgin polyester, as well as reducing landfill. Initially, TNF focussed its efforts to use recycled synthetics in more high-volume goods, like their TKA Glacier ¼ zip fleece and the iconic Denali Jacket, and more recently in…

Hang on. Are you sure the GPS is right? I reckon we’ve lost the track. I told you we should have broken out the topo. And who’s got the compass anyway?”Taken near the Tasman Peninsula Flint Duxfield, Sydney, NSW (The full story behind this shot - and it involves a shark - will be in the October Wild newsletter. If you’re not receiving it already, go to wild.com.au/subscribe to sign up.) Flint wins an OSPREY TRANSPORTER 65 DUFFEL, valued at $199.95. Designed to be tied to yaks on faint footpaths, organising your gear library at home, or packing for the biggest trip of your life, the double coated TPU Nylon Transporter Duffel will take you there, and bring your gear back safe. osprey.com SEND US YOUR WILD SHOT TO WIN…

Perhaps it’s time now that I’ve been editor here at Wild for nearly two years to talk about how it came to be. You see, the thing is, I used to have an awesome life. A really awesome life. As a fulltime professional adventure photographer and writer, I travelled the world, living a life of dreams. I got paid to mountain bike in Bhutan. Paid to ski for a week with the US ski team in NZ. Paid to trek in PNG, going into places where the kids had never seen white men. Paid to ice climb in Colorado, cycle in Japan, hike in Canada, climb in Italy and Slovenia, etc, etc, etcetera. And there were multiple paid adventure gigs in every single Australian state and territory except the ACT…

Against all the gargantuan, industrial-scale machinery that is pillaging Tasmania’s native forests—the immense mechanical log loaders with their 10m reticulated grapplers, the mammoth dozers and excavators, the spidery cable loggers craning as high as eight-storey buildings—a simple hand-held tape measure may seem a strange tool with which to fight back, a veritable David against a horde of Goliaths. But over the last eight months, for a small, fledging group called Forestry Watch based out of Hobart, tape measures have been a key weapon of choice. They’re not just any old tape measures though, like the standard three or five metre ones you might get at Bunnings. These things need to be huge, because they are used measure forest giants—trees sometimes with girths in excess of 20m that suffer the misfortune…

I couldn’t yet tell whether this was just the kind of start I wanted for the trip, or an evil omen of what was to come. It was probably both. Night had fallen, and I couldn’t find my way back to the camp I’d established a couple of hours earlier. Well, I knew where it was—just 500m away down in the valley. But between me and it there was a band of low cliffs and rocks, and though it had only been a short time ago that I’d climbed up through it on my way to explore the head of the valley, now I couldn’t find the route I’d ascended. I arced my headlamp’s beam to and fro, like a samurai’s katana slicing through the darkness. I saw possibilities; they…

In Central Queensland lies a vast stretch of land known as the Sandstone Wilderness. At first glance, it’s nothing more than unending, tough woodland filled with ironbarks and brigalow. But tucked among these dry forests is an astounding network of deep gorges with towering sandstone cliffs and scarps, lush canyons of ferns and palms, unexpected waterfalls and sandstone outcrops of remarkable size and beauty. There are six national parks within the Sandstone Wilderness, protecting 5,000 square kilometres of land between Roma and Rockhampton, with Carnarvon National Park being the area’s jewel in the crown. Its blazing white sandstone cliffs protect a labyrinth of gorges and shaded chasms rich in ancient Aboriginal art sites of national significance. But the lesser known Sandstone Wilderness parks are equally impressive. Expedition National Park gives…

The Five Passes is a five-day loop walk in Mount Aspiring National Park (New Zealand’s South Island). This hike ticks all the boxes: Remote, challenging and extremely beautiful, think of it as the longer, wilder and more extreme version of the nearby Routeburn. And the best bit is that you will probably have it almost to yourself. You spend the days going up, up up, then down, down down, for as the name suggests, there are five passes; Sugarloaf Pass, Park Pass, Cow Saddle, Fiery Col and Fohn Saddle. Between these are gushing rivers, lush valleys and grassy flats. Much of the tramp is off track hiking, following rivers and ascending to reach each pass. The terrain isn’t too rugged, but navigation is required, and you will likely move slower…

I love down jackets (well, who doesn’t, except the geese). I have three, but during the winter months my ultra-lightweight hoodie is—because I live in a 130-year old house that is usually colder inside than out—after my jeans perhaps the most used piece of clothing of I have. It offers superior warmth for weight, and just seems to ‘match’ my body temp. It has a flaw though, as does any down jacket in Oz where sub-zero conditions are rare; precip here generally falls as rain and not snow. And once your downie is wet, it’s useless. Synthetic insulated jackets, of course, avoid that (and spare the geese), keeping you warm even when damp. But they can often be bulky and heavy, and just don’t match down jackets’ warmth-to-weight ratio. That’s…