Table of contents for Issue 188, Winter 2023 in Wild

“VALUABLE TIMBER-BEARING FORESTS OF ALPINE ASH WERE LARGELY EXCLUDED FROM THE PARK.” MOUNTAIN FORESTS AT RISK Victoria’s Alpine National Park only partially protects the forests of the state’s High Country. Ceasing native-forest logging in the areas around the park needs to begin now. Many Wild readers were part of the long and ultimately successful campaign in the 1970s and 80s that saw much of the Victorian high country protected in the Alpine National Park. What younger readers may not know, however, is that many important forests were excluded from the park. In effect, it has an ‘economic’ boundary—that is, the valuable timber-bearing forests of alpine ash were largely excluded from the park, while the commercially useless snow gums and higher alpine zones were included. Some areas of the proposed park…

Dr Philip Zylstra is a fire scientist and forest ecologist who looks at how plant species interact with weather and the terrain to affect fire behaviour, and how this in turn affects the survival of flora and fauna. His work has led to groundbreaking advances in firebehaviour modelling and landscape analysis. Phil believes that the questions we most need answered are often the ones that challenge paradigms and policies, but that the scale of our impact on the Earth means we no longer have the luxury of avoiding controversy. His current focus is on understanding how fire management can be adapted to work with the ‘ecological controls’ that have enabled forests to persist over evolutionary timescales. One of the things about being lowered on a long cable under a helicopter…

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 – the stuff…

“Ok Chris, you need to pull back to wait for Tim and Divya.” “Copy.” Chris Wills eats vert for breakfast. That posed a problem for this shot lining up perfectly; I was unable to get Chris on the radio for a while, and with his unbelievable tendency to move faster uphill than most move on the way down, the group weren’t climbing as a trio, and the balance of this shot was being thrown out. But having made contact with Chris, the team thankfully pulled together; it probably wouldn’t have made the cover of Wild otherwise (Ed: He’s right!) To get the big mountain perspective that Mt Feathertop deserves, and to cover all the zones the guys were planning to ride, I had to split from the group, make my…

When I meet Tyto, she has been living in a myrtle tree in takayna/Tarkine for 71 days. That’s over 1,700 hours. During that time, she has been bored exactly once. “I was complaining, like, “Olive, I am feeling bored!” Tyto jokes. “That happened somewhere near the beginning, for three hours, and it didn’t appear again.” takayna/Tarkine is a vast wild area, a rarity in a world where nature has increasingly been diminished and fragmented into remnant pockets. Gleaming white shores punctuated by dark jagged rocks are buffeted by the Roaring Forties (next landfall is Argentina). Rivers, darkened by tannin, wind gently through primeval forest. Cultural living sites, rock carvings and buttongrass plains mark the palawa people’s long custodianship of these lands. It’s a place that makes you feel small in…

“This fucked,” I think for the third time in ten seconds. The snow seems to be coming in faster than we can get “This rid of it. At this point, having lost my gloves in the snow twenty minutes earlier, my hands can’t feel the shovel; the numbness is an infuriating contrast to my stinking, roasting-hot body. It has been an hour of digging, sawing and hacking at snow, and the area still looks no closer to somewhere I’d pitch a tent—setting camp being the objective now, after several km of snowshoeing earlier today. And just prior to losing my gloves, I had hit the ‘hangry zone’. Then, to put icing on the cake—god I’d smash a cake right now, BTW—the bloke next to me seems to be enjoying himself.…

“This isn’t it.” I was getting saturated, huddling under a rock with two other sweaty dudes, and in a total whiteout at the top of the continent. The winds were howling. “What?” yelled Chris. “I don’t know much about survival,” I shouted back. “But this isn’t it.” The three of us were hiding under the rock avoiding a lightning storm we found ourselves not under, but in. The big metal rod that made up the bones of our shelter, conveniently placed in the highest point around, didn’t seem like the safest place to be. Now, however, we were getting soaked to the bone. If lightning doesn’t get us, hypothermia will. What are we doing here? I thought to myself not for the first time this trip. So, what were we…

We were only six hours into what was meant to be an easy five-day tour when we saved a man’s life. By ‘we’, I don’t mean ‘me’. Nor do I mean Peter, my partner in both life and on this climb. By ‘we’, I mean Will. Peter and I are alpine amateurs; our friend Will, conversely, is a mountain maestro. In exchange for a donation to his cat-rescue charity, he was guiding us on the ‘Spaghetti Tour’, a classic route through the Monte Rosa Massif—a collection of connected peaks spilling between Italy and Switzerland that culminates in the Dufourspitze, which at 4,634m is Western Europe’s second-highest peak. The route takes in many of the massif’s 4,000+m peaks, and is done—usually—over five days, with you staying at high-altitude mountain huts on…

THE SOUTH COAST OF NEW SOUTH WALES offers some of Australia’s finest coastal scenery. Few sections are better, however, than that along the route of NSW’s newest ‘Great Walk’, which opened only in April 2023: The Murramarang South Coast Walk (SCW). It’s a fabulous hike of 34km through Yuin Country down a stunning section of crinkle-cut coastline, with a seemingly endless string of jewelled, secluded beaches studded by rocky headlands. In fine weather, there are more shades of blue here than there are shades of green in Ireland. It’s not only the coastline that’s beautiful, though; impressive forests of tall spotted gum with thick understoreys of burrawang cycads lie along the route. And the fauna is a major attraction. It’s almost guaranteed you’ll see hundreds of ‘roos, but sightings of…

Back in the 1990s, two psychology professors at Cornell University in the US gave a cohort of undergrad students a logic test. Their aim was to analyse whether intelligence, or lack thereof, influenced self-awareness. And what they—one being David Dunning and the other being Justin Kruger—discovered was that indeed there is a correlation. Well, a negative correlation anyway. In what has since become known as the Dunning-Kruger effect, the pair summed up their findings like this: “It is one of the essential features of incompetence that the person so inflicted is incapable of knowing that they are incompetent.” Or, as John Cleese eloquently put it, “If you are really, really stupid, then it’s impossible for you to know you are really, really stupid.” Recently, however, there has been some pushback…

It was a single line on the bottom of a page in the only English book in the common room of the Spanish-speaking hostel I was visiting. I would have overlooked it, had my thumb not caught on the page as I flicked through. A town name and this quote: “Ruins atop a waterfall.” A bygone traveller had pencilled a faint tick beside the sentence as affirmation—the trace of a past adventure. I was intrigued. I flipped to the next page, hoping for more. Nothing. I whipped out my phone and Googled the town name. Nothing. I Googled the entire sentence. Nothing. Did this place even exist? I double checked the spelling. No error. What was going on? When my travel buddy also found no Google results, my adventure senses…

The Australian mountains have seen their first handful of snowstorms. Today I was pelted by hail up at Charlotte Pass; meanwhile, there was slush at my feet and the snow gums collected an icy armour. Winter is nearly here, and as our fingers get colder each morning, our minds move to backcountry adventures. This is a time to reflect on lessons learned from the 2022 season. Did you discover the perfect backcountry snack? A faster way to transition? Have you finally got your layering right? Weather is paramount in Australian touring, and it pays to be prepared for quickly changing conditions. Crucially, what did you learn about safety? THE RISK OF AUSTRALIAN AVALANCHES We’re starting to see climate change affect our snowpack, with inconsistent storms, rain at higher elevations, and…

I stare up at the never-ending slope of ice looming large in front of us, trying to discern if I have a good or bad gut feeling. No feelings at all. As we tie the figure-8 loops into our harnesses, I find myself rubbing the tiny brown toy-horse keepsake I’m carrying in my pocket that belongs to my nephew. I am used to assessing risk, especially out on the water; I am not, however, familiar with assessing risk on ice. The uncertainty is daunting. We are remote, very remote, with a real risk of both crevasses and moulins; there is no room for error. The ground crunches beneath our crampons as we begin the climb, one step at a time. At the crest of this hill, I stop to scan…

HALFWAY BETWEEN STANTHORPE AND TENTERFIELD, nestling against the NSW border, lies one of Queensland’s most spectacular reserves: Girraween National Park. Roughly 120,000 annual visitors come to experience the 12,000ha park’s vast expanses of impressive granite formations, which include football-field-length slabs, living-room-sized boulders and distinctively dome-shaped mountains. The granite was formed roughly 250 million years ago, when a major geological-compression event caused vast bodies of molten magma to rise through the Earth’s crust. While some broke the surface and erupted from volcanoes, much of the magma remained under the Earth’s surface, slowly cooling and solidifying to create granite intrusions. Erosive forces—which have worn away kilometres-thick upper layers of rock—and upwards expansion has since produced swathes of granite peaks. Complex forces associated with this expansion also caused vertical fractures in the granite,…

We were in over our heads. Here we were, on the final climb to Magdala’s summit, and two options presented themselves: Either go directly over the massive cornice, or traverse around and ascend the southern (and wind-slab avalanche-prone) aspect. It was a daunting choice, one that could mean our lives. Despite the risk, we chose the latter. Not a single step felt secure. One misplaced kick of a boot, or one crack of the ice underneath, could spell the end of me. Or us. We thought the real danger would be at the Crosscut Saw, not here. But now here I was, torn between scurrying to the summit to minimise my time in the danger zone, or taking my time and being surefooted. I chose the latter. In any case,…

TO WINTER CAMP IN THE MOUNTAINS is to experience their truest form. They are raw. Wild. Inhospitable. The peaks are alive as spindrift wafts from knife-edged ridges, as idyllic lakes fill in and become powdery bowls, and as avalanches transport frozen slopes like frenzied rivers. They are places where pleasantries are exchanged for excitement, challenges and the great unknown—the elements that ultimately drive us to explore. When camping in the winter mountains, we are temporary visitors to inhospitable environments; to explore them, we need a space to exist—a tiny home. Inuit peoples addressed the challenges of life in the snow by designing the igloo. Alpinists introduced their own special designations of suffering in the forms of the snow cave and the bivy. And then there is the tent. I am…