Table of contents for Issue 174, Nov-Dec 2019 in Wild

Inspiration I’ve been thinking a lot about the Daintree lately. This is only partly because this issue of mag looks at—as the third in our year-long series on Australia’s great environmental battles—the campaign to save it. No, more importantly, I’m thinking of a road trip I once took there that changed my life. When I was four, my parents loaded up our car and took me on a six-week trip to Cape Tribulation, camping all the way. Cape Trib in the 70s was almost completely undeveloped. The road in was a goat track, barely passable in our 2WD. I have vivid memories of getting bogged in sand, of Dad knocking off the muffler and then tying it back on with some vine, and of him lying in water under the…

Habitat loss and fragmentation and the spread of invasive species are major threats to biodiversity in Australia. Conserving habitat on private land is an important response to this threat. When private lands are protected for conservation, it increases the overall amount of preserved habitat and also increases connectivity between state-owned reserves such as national parks. The Tasmanian Land Conservancy (TLC) buys land and places it in reserves; works with private landholders to identify, protect and manage important areas on their own properties; and purchases, protects (with conservation covenants) and re-sells land. But buying land is just the first step. For conservation to be successful, the TLC needs to track the status of the species on these lands and take steps to ensure their continued ecological health. ON THE VALE OF…

“Guys, where is the raft?” We were roughly halfway into a month-long paddling and canyoning expedition down Peru’s wild and mighty Rio Marañón when we awoke to hear this alarming question. We’d slept heavily that evening. We’d run the crux rapid of the trip the day before, a long grade IV stretch that had my palms sweating and my heart beating, but we’d come out the other side unscathed and overjoyed. In celebration, we cracked open beers that had been brought in by donkey. Whether it was because of the drinking or because of sheer exhaustion, no-one had stirred through the night. And now, roused by that question, we gathered around, deep in this remote gorge, looking at the rope we’d used to secure the raft (along with all our…

“It’s gone up to three now”, Laura says, doing an excellent impression of the world’s least enthusiastic auctioneer. She’s giving me the weather forecast while we pack for a six-day hike on Fraser Island, and in an hour it’s gone from one mm of rain to three. Soon her phone will update the prognosis to five mills. Then ten. The groans grow louder. Laura is a far more accomplished hiker than me, and no stranger to adverse conditions. She’s a lean, determined woman who walked the length of New Zealand on the Te Araroa trail. Her book Bewildered tells the story of that 3000km journey and the challenges she encountered along the way, but this trip was supposed to be a pleasant escape from winter in the southern states. She…

A bright all-rounder First released in 2017, 2019’s iteration of the Petzl ACTIK delivers a great all-round unit suitable for most conditions. Let’s get to the important stuff first: maximum brightness. The new model jumps to a whopping 350 lumens; for a lightweight headlamp, that’s bright. Although you won’t see much difference at the advertised maximum of 80m, at close range, it really lights up the dark. As well as the 350 lumens output, the ACTIK has two other ‘white’ light configurations (6 lumens and 100 lumens, which give six and 45 metres visibility respectively; a ‘red’ light mode of 2 lumens; and a strobe which is visible for 700m. But brightness isn’t the be all and end all when it comes to headlamps (and in any event, as with…

This battle we lost. It was a war, however, that we won. The fight in the 80s to protect the stretch of pristine rainforest north of Cape Tribulation and on up to the Bloomfield River is Queensland’s most famous environmental campaign. It followed in close proximity to Terania Creek and Franklin blockades, but while the former had been fought over logging, and the latter over a dam, this one was over a 30km stretch of road, a road that would slice through “a living museum of plant and animal species in what is one of the few remaining examples of undisturbed coastal rainforests in the world”. This quote, however, does not come from an ecologist, or a blockader, or a ‘greenie’; it comes from an entirely more unexpected source: Joh…

How could the tallest single drop waterfall in Australia not have a highline on top of it? It was a simple question, posed by Ben Thegreywolf. Ben is a quiet-natured man, but when he speaks it is always time to listen. The problem was that he proposed resolving his question in just two weeks’ time. What’s more, when he asked it, I was sitting by a pool taking a very overdue holiday with my girlfriend, and this was not the most romantic thing to bring up. In a month, I was leaving the country for a project in Russia. But Ben hooked me. Waterfall highlines are one of the most prized forms of the art. And with me being a photographer by trade, I didn’t want to miss this opportunity…

Upon first sight—and yes, I feel guilty even typing this—it was somewhat unimpressive. Shimmering through the heat-haze rising from the long stretch of tarmac, the gentle bump upon the horizon was barely discernible. To be fair this was about 20km away from the monument in question, on a country highway, peering through the front windscreen of a moving vehicle. Beside me, my climbing buddy Rijan “100%!” Young was boiling-over with characteristic enthusiasm, pointing at this uninspiring lump as we zoomed across the pan-flat topography of southwest Victoria’s Wimmera Plains. Luckily, I knew better than to be fooled by the landscape so easily. Mecca, Shangri-La and the Promised Land of world-class rock climbing all rolled into one—that’s what awaited us out there. It just hadn’t revealed itself properly yet. Soon enough,…

My conscious journey into the realm of nature writing began relatively recently while swooning through Inga Simpson’s Understory, a heartbreaking and heart-fortifying memoir, viewed through the refracted incandescence of nature. In hindsight, however, the formative, and maybe most cataclysmic nature writing impact quaked into me many years ago, through the epic power of The Tree of Man and Voss. The Tree of Man (like Voss, written by Patrick White; both being perspective-tilting literary thunderbolts) and Under-story are alike in addressing a tension between nature and its harnessing for commerce, as well as the social dynamic which then unavoidably comes into play (Exhibits One and Two: Family life and community). It’s a frequently apparent theme in this selection of nature writing. Having been brought up in country towns and, as [mis]fortune…

The ‘Stans—a region formally known as ‘Central Asia’—is one that most people think about very little, and know about even less. And while most people imagine them to be monolithic, these countries whose names share a common ending can be as different from each other as Bhutan is from Bangladesh. It was partly this cultural mix that drew me, but more than that it was simply the mountains—some of the world’s highest and most spectacular outside of the Himalaya, and empty of the crowds that mobbed better-known alpine destinations like Nepal. Over a two-and-a-half-month span, I cut a meandering clockwise half-circle on my 29+ titanium touring bike through Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan and Tajikistan—exploring peaks and passes, river valleys and meadows, canyons and deserts—until my legs were jellied and my skin tanned…

For anyone in need of good calorific fare, (if you, for example, like us, are about to traverse Greenland’s icecap on skis), the Pilersuisoq supermarket in Kangerlussuaq, Greenland, has what you need: Musk ox burgers. Whale steaks. Baby milk formula. Frozen meats. Dried fish. Chocolate. It’s all there, as we discover, all manner of tempting tidbits, and our Gore-Tex clad group wanders the aisles, bantering away about the relative caloric merits of whale vs ox in a poor attempt to mask our all-too-obvious nerves. The attendant, an Inuit, eyes us off from behind the store’s lone till. Amused by our child-like chit-chat, it’s unlikely we’re the first adventurous group he’s sized up. Kangerlussuaq, population 499, lies within the Arctic Circle, at the end of a 190km-fjord, and exists mainly for…

Get set for Australia’s biggest climb on this spectacular walk, followed by days of romping through alpine meadows and then a rock-hopping descent back down to the valley. Due to the dramatically changing altitude, it’s a walk of incredibly varied landscapes. There are waterfalls surrounded by tree ferns and lush vegetation, rocky creek beds which become steep canyons, and dense forests which fade into wide-open alpine meadows. Starting from the Geehi River and then ascending Hannels Spur, you’ll spend two days climbing nearly 1,800 vertical metres up to the very summit of Australia, Mt Kosciuszko, where you’ll definitely feel you’ve earned the breathtaking alpine views. A day is then spent high on the alpine plateau strolling among Australia’s highest peaks, and there’s an optional side trip to Blue Lake. The…

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“My husband and I are in our seventies, but on a recent ‘adventure’ tour from Perth to Darwin, we decided to act like we were in our thirties. When we arrived in Karajini National Park, we booked in—with some trepidation—to do a canyoning trip. It turned out to be the highlight of our journey. Sliding down the slot and dropping into the cold water of the plunge pool below, wearing a wetsuit and with a backpack, was exhilarating. I felt truly alive.”Merilyn House, Helensburgh, NSW Merilyn 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,…