We had survived rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, and did sunrise at the rim before we left the area. Even though we knew the story of the Spanish Conquistadors who had stood on the rim in 1540 and estimated that the Colorado must be no more than 6 feet wide, we still…
Zion National Park, named by the Mormon settlers in Utah as a place of refuge (replacing the indigenous name Mukuntuweap for something less “difficult to pronounce”), is a world-famous canyoning destination. We had done almost no research, as we knew that our canyon options would be entirely dictated by the conditions as we were definitely…
America wasn’t even on the list. But when you get invited to raft down the Colorado River where it carves through the Grand Canyon, you obviously drop everything else and make that happen. And so it was for us. Not only was this the trip of a lifetime for rafters, but as canyoners we could…
The Dolomites almost didn’t happen. They had been recommended to us, and our friends in Switzerland had unfortunately been laid up by injury, freeing time at the end of our trip through Europe. The alta vias or “high ways/routes” through the mountains were booked well in advance, and our first glance was not promising: accommodation…
It was almost accidental: the administrator of a Facebook group of canyoning photography had shared a few of my pictures, and in noticing my post about visiting Europe, invited us to join him for canyoning in the Pyrenees. This sort of online interaction was unusual for us, and we were hesitant, but we didn’t have…
“Land of Ice and Fire.” So goes the popular tagline for Iceland (particularly since the cultural phenomenon of Game of Thrones), referencing the contrast between the island’s active glaciers and volcanoes, snow-bound winters and perpetual geothermal heating. Even the human history here is one of extremes, being the last sizeable landmass settled by people in…
Travelling by visiting people has some major advantages, particularly in Europe, and particularly particularly in Norway, especially when one is seeking to lower travel costs because one has taken a year off work. Rowan, who we had known from the ANU Mountaineering Club in Canberra, had been basically advertising Norway through his spectacular photos since…
Since the modern honeymoon* originated in Victorian Britain, and since Queen Victoria herself waited two years after her marriage with Albert to travel to Scotland for their belated honeymoon, and since our own honeymoon had been delayed for two years at least in part by me finishing my PhD thesis on neo-Victorian literature, it could…
At the close of our time living in Canberra, our last hurrah with the Australian National University Mountaineering Club had been an exploratory canyoning expedition to Tasmania, the island where Nick and I were returning to live after our jaunt in the capital. While the canyoning scene is smaller than in the Blue Mountains, the…
“May contain nudity and some coarse language.” So reads our logbook entry in the Lake Vera Hut, on the last morning of an epic three day trip into Frenchmans Cap. For myself and my brother, who was visiting from Victoria, it was the last morning of six days of bushwalking. We’d already raced up and…
In late March 2017, Cyclone Debbie crashed into the Whitsunday Islands. The Category 4 system* had sustained winds reaching 191 km/h with gusts up to 263 km/h recorded on Hamilton Island, the largest inhabited island of the group, resulting in extensive damage to infrastructure, forests and reefs. Months later, in far-flung Tasmania (our only knowledge of the…
Some things in 2016 were just meant to happen. Perhaps Brexit and Trump are the logical expression of rising inequality and anxiety about neoliberalism and globalisation? And perhaps the universe had plans to correct our absence from the ANU Mountaineering Club’s annual Cocktails on the Castle event by encouraging us to host our own in…
On 1 of May 2016, the draft Wild Horse Management Plan for the Kosciuszko National Park (KNP) 2016 (the 2016 Plan) was released for public comment. This article is a response to that plan, and is written by a bushwalker for a bushwalking audience. It was originally published in the latest edition of the Bushwalk…
Adventure photography is about balance. The photographer must figuratively balance the benefits of taking a superior camera with the risk that it could be damaged, or compromise on image quality in order to have a camera that is always at hand. Then of course there is the literal balancing when taking photographs in situations that…
My first attempt at Mt Anne back in undergraduate days left much business unfinished. Not only did I manage to crash a friend’s borrowed car into the embankment, but I didn’t even manage to successfully write it off (indeed, he had to finish it off himself several weeks later, an icy road delivering what…
words and wilds 