Posted on July 26, 2010, 9:54 am, by Frank, under
Tasmania.
We love to read stories of adversary and tough times. Sometimes hiking conditions can test and challenge you like never before.
In this article we welcome Greg, who has been kind enough to share his recent Tasmanian bushwalking experience on a trip from the Walls of Jerusalem via the Never Never to the Oveland Track in Tasmania.
We have done this trip twice. Our article Lake Meston Hut to Kia Ora Hut via the Never Never has a small map of the area and documents our experiences. It might be an interesting background to Greg and his son’s story.
So, over to Greg who reflects on the trip, often referring back to the GPS waypoints we sent him a couple of months ago to help navigate through this area:
My 15 year old son and I aimed to replicate the walk you gave me on the GPS. It seemed the most logical thing to do regarding distances covered in one day etc. We even started out the same with a trip with Simon from Tasmania Tour Company to the beginning of Walls of Jerusalem! Simon asked me my walking intentions and when I said I was going across the Never Never to the Overland Track he kind of paused and then said, “Take it easy through there. There has been a lot of rain down that way.” I replied, “Yeah, no worries!”, sounding confident but not really sure of what his definition of ‘a lot of rain’ was! He did remind us though that we would see ‘no one’ through there in winter.
The first day was spent walking to Dixons Kingdom Hut and we had an evening of wind, heavy rain and then a decent blanket of snow.
If you’re an Aussie hiker then you probably already know and love Great Walks Magazine. If you’ve never heard of it, now is as good a time as any to head out and buy yourself a copy. Need convincing? Well read on and you might be persuaded.
Brent McKean has been editor of Great Walks for several years now and is obviously a very keen hiker. I recently asked him to participate in a brief e-mail interview, thinking it would be a good opportunity for Our Hiking Blog readers to find out a bit more about another interesting outdoors enthusiast and also about the magazine.
This is a guest post by Neil Fahey from Bushwalking Blog. Neil does a lot of hiking (mainly day-hikes around Melbourne) and shares in-depth trip reports on his blog. He has also recently written a few stories for Great Walks Magazine.
Continuing our series of interviews with interesting outdoor people, let us introduce Andy Reynolds.
Andy, is an Outdoor Educator with many years experience exploring some fantastic parts of Australia.
He walks, climbs and loves snow sports. His latest venture is Soulfree Adventures , a company that “specialise in providing high quality walking tours for the walking traveller”. While Andy is keen to promote his business (and who wouldn’t be), he also has a huge amount of experience in the outdoors and some fantastic yarns he has shared.
We hope you enjoy Andy Reynolds’ story.
O.K. Let ’s keep it simple. How about a bit of background on yourself. Where do you live? Where do you work?
I live in beautiful downtown Buninyong, a small rural village whose key claims to fame I suppose are being Victoria’s first proclaimed inland settlement (Wiki) and the home of the Scody Australian Road Cycling Championships, on our notoriously gruelling hilly course on the slopes of Mount Buninyong, an extinct volcano.
It’s also a pretty nice place to live. I run my own walking company Soulfree Adventures from my home office on Buninyong. This gives me the freedom to work as long as I want (!) and is a great base for work and play.
Let’s get into your early bushwalking experiences. How did you first get into bushwalking? Any particular mentor or group?
I first got into bushwalking as a student at a well known Melbourne private school. Back in the 70’s we still had 3 term school years and each school holidays our loosely described bushwalking group would head for Breakfast Creek, north of Licola in the heart of Victorian Alps.
So we traveled to Falls Creek for the opening of the Victorian snow season. We did not ski but hiked in snow and on ice. We got vaguely “off track”. We discovered the delights of the Australian Alps Walking Track (AAWT) and are keen to return. In this article we recount a 16km day hike through some beautiful country in the Australian Alps near Falls Creek and the AAWT. It was great to get the first snow for the season and have a terrific walk.
In this article we interview Dennis Harding one of Tasmania’s leading (maybe THE leading) Wilderness Photographers. We met Dennis at Kitchen Hut, near Cradle Mountain in Tasmania a few weeks ago and following a quick exchange of contact information caught up by email and arranged this interview.
Dennis is the author of eight Tasmanian books and each year releases two calendars – “Spectacular Tasmania” and “Classic Images”. Of course there is also a DVD (which looks pretty cool) so you could say Dennis takes photography seriously.
We hope you enjoy this insight into Dennis and the fantastic wilderness images from Tasmania he has generously shared. Our personal favourite is ……? What is your’s?
