Table of contents for Issue 195, Autumn 2025 in Wild

When the sun rises over NSW’s Budawangs, highlighting the textures of the sheer sandstone cliffs and accentuating the dominance of Pidgeon House against an empty backdrop, you know you’re looking at a one-in-a-million sight. This is what makes the 1,000m of elevation gain to summit the Castle all worth it. by SEB ASHTON Les Ching on Agamemnon (11) at Mt Arapiles. The climb, with its sustained chasm, is an Arapiles classic; it is also one of more than 1,000 routes destined to be banned under proposed closures for what some would argue is Australia’s most significant climbing area. You can read an opinion piece on the closures by former Wild Editor Ross Taylor on p46. by MARCUS READ In November 2024, the inaugural GPT 100 Miler race took place on…

With 488km of coastline—ocean beaches, estuaries, islands, rocky headlands and secluded inlets—Lutruwita/Tasmania is a haven for shorebirds. Among these are more than twenty species that travel tens of thousands of kilo-metres each year, flocking from Russia and Alaska to the southern hemisphere in September, and returning in April to the northern summer to breed. Millions of these birds make the migration, island hopping through East Asia and covering extraordinary distances at great speed. In 2022, a bar-tailed godwit was tracked from Siberia to Tasmania, and it covered 13,560km, non-stop, in just eleven days. These migrating birds can’t swim; if they become exhausted, they fall into the ocean and drown. The route that they follow is called the East Asian-Australasian Flyway, and Tasmania lies at its southern end. It’s a hazardous…

1st January 2024. Two 18-year-olds set off from Melbourne on pushbikes to head north on a lap around Australia. But this isn’t your usual bike-around-Oz trip—Leo Norman and Cezary Carmichael have an ambitious goal, one that will take them well off the beaten track: Over the course of twelve months, they’re aiming to see 700 bird species, some of them Australia’s rarest. Leo has been mulling on this idea for a few years, but Cezary only bought his bike three weeks ago. It’s mid-summer and these childhood friends ride north, their first big ride, with twenty days to get to Brisbane. This is their baptism of fire, but it’s only the beginning of a trip that will take them 14,000km, through some of the most remote parts of Australia. It…

MT LOGAN, AT ALMOST 6,000M, is Canada’s highest summit. Second only to Denali in North America, it’s claimed to be the world’s most massive mountain that isn’t a volcano, with its elevation and bulk a result of rapid uplift caused by the nearby contact of several tectonic plates. The mountain’s appalling weather is legendary. It sits close to the Gulf of Alaska, and cops large amounts of precipitation. As a result, it is surrounded by huge glaciers that comprise the world’s largest non-polar icefield, a vast mountain wilderness that straddles the border between Yukon in Canada and Alaska in the USA. These glaciers provide scope for a circumnavigation of the massif on skis—a 220km ‘circumski’. First completed in 1979, the circumski has been undertaken only a handful of times since.…

with the Tasmanian Wilderness Guides Association WILD: When was the association formed and why? And how many members do you currently have? TWGA: The Tasmanian Wilderness Guides Association (TWGA) was formed in 2019 to provide a united voice for Lutruwita’s/Tasmania’s outdoor-guiding community. We currently have about 100 members, the majority of which are active guides, some are retired guides, and some are corporate partners; these are businesses who share our vision and values. Our mission is to advocate on behalf of our members to ensure responsible custodianship of the wild places in which we work and play, to be paid a fair wage and have good working conditions, to create better training and educational opportunities and to help cultivate and celebrate Tasmania’s unique guiding culture. WILD: What does the association…

The Taiari River is so uninterested in reaching the ocean that, at every turn, it takes the road less travelled. Exiting to the sea just 60km from its source, but taking 288km to make the journey, the Taiari turns what most rivers would make into a short run to the coast into New Zealand’s fourth-longest river. It’s a circuitous, meandering river journey like no other. The river—officially known as the Taieri, a result of misspelling the original Māori name Taiari—is born in the snow- and golden-tussock country of the South Island, and is a waterway of extremes. The catchment is known for holding both the coldest and warmest temperatures recorded in the country. Its unique, continental-like climate gets so hot in summer that the river becomes the lungs of the…

It’s the first thing that anyone thinks of when it comes to gear repairs in the field: duct tape. It was invented in 1943 by Vesta Stoudt, an Illinois, USA, mum who was working in a WWII ordnance-packing plant, when her idea for a waterproof cloth tape was ignored by her supervisors. She wrote a letter to American President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, and the idea impressed him so much he passed it onto the War Production Board, who in turn directed a division of Johnson and Johnson to commence manufacturing the tape. In the eighty-two years since, duct tape has saved the arses of countless outdoor adventurers. Including mine. I’ve used it in the field to repair (and this is far from a definitive list) skiwear, rain gear, puffer jackets,…

HERE’S THE SCENARIO: It’s sunny and stinking hot, and you’re trying your darndest to stay cool during an outdoorsy pursuit. The prospect of roasting in a long-sleeve shirt, for sun protection, ain’t appealing. Especially if you’re a sweaty bugger like me; I sweat just thinking about the heat. So whaddya do? Recently, I discovered a product I hoped would simultaneously keep me sun-safe and stop the sweatfest: the Outdoor Research ActiveIce Spectrum Sun Hoodie. I mean, with a technology called ‘ActiveIce’, surely it’d keep me cool as a cucumber? First things first, though. The OR Spectrum is seriously comfortable, silky smooth to the touch, and its stretchy, semi-relaxed fit provides freedom of movement. Sun-protection wise, it’s ideal: Rated at UPF 50+, you can’t get much better, especially when you use…

We get it; we know ads aren’t the primary reason you read Wild. But without our supporters, Wild simply wouldn’t exist*. If you love what we’re on about here at Wild, if you’re passionate about both adventure and protecting our natural heritage, if having a magazine that’s full of well-written, crafted stories means something to you, a magazine that fights hard for our environment, then support our supporters; without them, Wild wouldn’t exist. We know that our advertising supporters aren’t, of course, your only options when it comes to choosing what gear you purchase. But if you’re in a situation where you have a few cool options to choose from, and one of them happens to be from one of our advertisers, then show them their support means something by choosing…

With all the crap going on in the world at the moment, I thought I wanted to give myself a challenge for this issue’s letter: Write something funny. Something so light-hearted it would float off the page. Something that would serve as an antidote to the onslaught of depressing developments that seem to be hitting us in waves, kind of like when you’re out in the surf and a big set comes in, so that just as you come up for breath after being pummelled by one wave, another huge wave pounds in, forcing you to dive again, come up for a split-second of air, then dive again, and so on. I don’t know whether I need to go into details of all the metaphorical ‘waves’ crashing in at the…

UPDATE ON STATE OF THE MURRAY-DARLING BASIN Ngarrindjeri Country and beyond Australia’s greatest river system deserves better treatment. It’s a critical time for the future of water security in Australia. Our climate is changing, and we need to have an honest conversation about what this means for Australia’s greatest river system, the Murray-Darling Basin. The Murray and Darling/Baaka rivers that make up the basin are parched and in desperate need of a drink. In South Australia, we’re in the midst of a long, dry summer. It hasn’t quite pierced metro-politan mindsets, but many parts of regional South Australia have recorded the driest periods on record. Across the state, farmers continue struggling with drought conditions. Dry conditions have seen the lowest amount of water inflows to Adelaide’s reservoirs in more than…

In early November at 5.12PM, the day before both the 2024 Melbourne Cup (and its associated public holiday) and the US election, Parks Victoria (PV) released its draft amended Management Plan for Mt Arapiles/Dyurrite in western Victoria. It soon became clear why PV had tried to bury the news: The new plan shuts rockclimbers and bushwalkers out of most of the park, banning 63 per cent of the available climbing routes and all off-track walking. This management plan follows a similar one released in 2021 for the nearby Grampians/Gariwerd National Park, which shut down 80 per cent of the rockclimbing, and locked climbers and bushwalkers out of large swathes of the park by banning off-track walking. If this new Dyurrite Management Plan comes into effect without any changes, it will…

“Aha, we meet again!” I say, enjoying the brief look of confusion that crosses Chris Bray’s brow while he tries, and fails, to pull my face from his past. I can’t blame him; the feature-length documentary premiere of his and Clark Carter’s world-first, unsupported slog across Arctic Canada’s Victoria Island, The Crossing, was over ten years ago, and mine would have been but one handshake of many. I soon put him out of his misery and he reverts to a welcoming grin, looking somewhere between his hilariously ruffled Instagram profile pic and the slick pro shots from various marketing campaigns. We’ve met for dinner at Swell Lodge, an ecolodge that Chris established in 2018 and has run ever since on his adopted home of Christmas Island. Chris’s 173cm frame and…

The small kingdom of Bhutan, nestled in the Himalayas between India and China, is shrouded in myths and tales. It’s claimed that entry visas are deliberately limited. Bhutanese people are often declared to be the happiest on the planet, with their government asserting it prioritises Gross National Happiness over Gross Domestic Product. The famous Taktsang (Tiger’s Nest) Monastery is believed to have been established where a guru landed on the back of a tigress in the 8th Century. And yes, the country is adorned with conspicuous phallic symbols, seen as murals or sculptures everywhere. One day, as if to outdo the legends, my friend Tom Öhler called. “I heard the Prince of Bhutan is an avid mountain biker who builds trails himself. You’ve been there several times—let’s check it out.”…

Heading out on solo adventures isn’t always easy, nor always fun, nor is it for everyone, but rewards await those willing to accept the challenge. Ibegan writing this piece thinking that it was a story about a wilderness hike, but as my ideas began to take shape, I realised that this is a story about overcoming yourself, and it’s a story about loneliness … “Shit, I’ve lost the track again.” I sighed, exasperated. I was on it two seconds ago; now I couldn’t even see where it was to backtrack. This had been happening every five minutes for the last two hours, and to compound these nav frustrations, a heavy mist shrouded the ridge I was on, soaking me and restricting my visibility. I was coming to the end of…

LUTRUWITA/TASMANIA’S BAY OF FIRES, the stretch of the state’s north-east coastline from Binalong Bay to the top of Mt William National Park, has graced ‘top tourist destination’ lists for decades. Its beautiful beaches, lichen-covered rocks, and its luxurious private-hut walk, have brought it international fame. And yet, or because of this, it rarely rates a mention in serious bushwalking circles. These track notes hope to change that. They detail a three-day 65km route along white-sand beaches and around coves crammed with cockle and scallop shells, all washed by a crystal-clear, turquoise ocean. Despite its fame, this stunning stretch of coast retains its remote and secluded feel. It is hugely undeveloped and is still free to walk independently and on your own terms. It is a place with a rich and…