Tag: hiking (Page 2 of 4)

Mt Jagungal and the Rolling Grounds

16 January 2020 / author

This was written in 2013. I wonder if it could be written like this in 2020. With the world changing, will it ever again be safe to hike deep in the Snowy Mountains in summer?

Summer in the Snowies. Fire risk, hot wind, horse flies the size of your fist. Perfect for a four day hike, right? Maybe not, but if you stay indoors with the air-con you also miss the alpine meadows, cool, fresh streams, snow gums and mountain huts. And above all, you’d miss the wonderful views from mighty Mount Jagungal, crows soaring in the updrafts, a glorious place on a deep blue sky day.

They call it the GRAND Canyon

16 October 2019 / author

The Grand Canyon. As the guidebook said, “Heard of it? Still here, still frikkin big”. And, it should have added, still frikkin amazing.

Climbing Mt Kinabalu

28 August 2019 / author

“To be tramping under the stars toward a great mountain is always an adventure; now we were adventuring for the first time in a new mountain country which still held in store for us all its surprises and almost all its beauties.”*

George Leigh-Mallory wrote that in 1922 after his first reconnaissance of Mt Everest. He would die on its high and unforgiving peak two years later, just below the summit, to lie there frozen and unfound until the famous expedition of 1999 discovered his corpse, pale as alabaster, somewhere below 8,200 meters.

I wasn’t thinking of this as we climbed the considerably lower rock slopes of Borneo’s Mount Kinabalu – I just happened on that passage reading Leigh-Mallory’s book on the plane to Kota Kinabalu. But his words describe perfectly the feeling we had that morning, at 3,900 meters and still short of the summit, with a big moon directly overhead and the Southern Cross low on our left side. Pale clouds filled the sky below us, surrounding our little rocky island in the night sky.

Three year old’s first bivvy

27 June 2019 / author

I didn’t get a minute of sleep, not one. Even with the bare minimum of stuff I still had a huge load to carry – including a three year old and all our water – and there wasn’t room for a sleeping mat. So it was a long, hard night on the bare ground underneath a tarp flapping in very strong winds.

Once the kid was down, I lay there listening to the cacophony, counting down the moments until it rained, and waiting for dawn to break. She slept like a log under the faintly ridiculous shelter I built from a tarp, two tent pegs and her baby carrier. Not bad for her first ever bivvy.

Click through for a video and stills of our first Daddy-Daughter Bivvy.

The High Alps of Karakol

5 May 2019 / author

Fresh air, fresh water, green grass and alpine flowers. Friendly shepherds, spectacular lakes, nightly storms and hot springs. High altitudes and glaciers. And a seemingly inexhaustible supply of delicious chocolate.

Switzerland?

Kyrgyzstan. Pronounced with a hard “g”, as we discovered on our first day.

A little slice of God’s own country (they call him Allah) wedged between China’s imposing Heavenly Mountains and the vast steppes to the north.

Arequipa and the Colca Canyon

8 April 2019 / author

Arequipa was once a very long drive over a bumpy road from Lima. By 2010, and presumably still today, you could ride a modern road on a comfortable overnight bus with reclining seats, a hot meal served by the cabin crew, movies to watch and breakfast with coffee the next morning. Some might sneer at this level of comfort but we’ve done enough really tough bus rides in our time that we were happy to kick back and enjoy the service.

High up from the dry and sandy desert coast, Arequipa is visually dramatic. Surrounded by conical volcanos and bathed in lovely sunlight streaming from a clear blue sky, it was a welcome change from grey and gritty Lima.

This was good, because we ended up staying a long time…

The Lost Village of Skarð and the Wild Lighthouse at Kallur

30 January 2019 / author

Sadness pervades the whole story of Skarð. A hundred years ago, 1913 to be precise, it was a hard-scrabble fishing village like so many on the Faroes. No roads linked it to larger settlements, just a dangerous walk over the rocky mountain ridge to Kunoy on the other side, or a path down the fjord to Haraldssund several miles south. The land scarcely supports the grass the sheep graze on, so fishing was the villagers’ main source of food and income. Just 23 souls lived here, and only seven were fishermen.

Two days before Christmas that year, the seven set out in their boats as usual. In those days of course, fishing boats were sailed or rowed. There was no radio, radar, GPS or EPIRB. Just a man, his wits, and his raw strength stacked against what Shackleton called “the ocean that is open to all and merciful to none, that threatens even when it seems to yield, and that is pitiless always to weakness”.

They never returned. Lost with all hands.

Tarfala Valley, Arctic Sweden

2 January 2019 / author

The fastest wind speed ever recorded at Tarfala was over 180 kilometers per hour. As I leaned into it, unable to move forwards, and barely able to stand, I thought it must not be too far short of that record. Strangely, there was no howl; there was nothing for the wind to hit except me, our daughter in my pack, and Yon about twenty paces behind. No howl, just a sudden horrendous flapping as the red sheet protecting my child flew loose at one corner.

“Are you scared, baby?”, I yelled. “No”, she said. “Well just a little bit”.

We were 26 kilometers into this hike; even for Arctic Sweden it was getting dark by now, nearly ten hours since we set off at noon. I was wet through, and, as Hicks and Hudson classically exchanged, either my ~~motion detector~~ GPS was reading wrong, or I was reading it wrong.

Where was the damn hut?

Choquequirao – Castle in the Sky

4 December 2018 / author

↑ Choquequirao

Unlike Sheeta, Yonnie didn’t fall magically from a dirigible to meet me. And there weren’t evil sky-pirates out to capture us. But in many other ways, our 2010 trek to the high, lonely, lost Incan city of Choquequirao reminded me of Laputa of the Miyazaki film “Castle in the Sky”, with its dignified ruins and green lawns hidden in the soaring peaks of the Andes. It was a very special place.

Gansu Province’s Incredible Great Walls and Silk Road Sites: Part I

11 November 2018 / author

This is a story about the Great Wall, but even more than that it’s a story about a guy I know who’s really, really into the Great Wall. Yes, I know I’m into the Wall; but I am nothing more than a young, naive Luke Skywalker to this guy’s Yoda. In May 2013 I joined him on an expedition to explore obscure, remote parts of the wall out in Gansu Province, as far west as historical China extended during the Han and Ming dynasties. In a week with Yoda, I would climb a rockface, navigate by night, gather Han potsherds, thumb rides by the side of the freeway, and eat stir fried gizzards. I also learned a lot about the Great Wall, and made a good friend.