Stories of the mountains…
Adventure alone
“YOU SHOULDN’T do that.”
“It’s dangerous.”
“What if you have an accident?”.
The advice is all of one type — the well intentioned warnings of friends offered when they think someone is about to do something chancy.
The target of their concern is Suzie. She is a fit though not a tall woman somewhere in her thirties. Her long black hair and her face suggest an Asian heritage. Her livelihood is made in front of a screen in the digital world.
Her friends reacted with alarm when she told them she was going to walk solo along the Overland Track from Cradle Mountain to Lake St Clair. The Track is one of Tasmania’s most popular, thanks to the state government’s promotion of it due to its reliance on tourism as the state’s biggest income earner. It wasn’t alway that way. When my friends and I made journeys along it 40 years ago, we would go for days without seeing anothern person. Those we did see were all experienced bushwalkers. The huts we overnighted in were rough bush shelters. It is different now. Huts have gas heating and have been substantially upgraded. They are full during peak walking season. The national parks service limits numbers on the Track in an attempt to avoid overcrowding. They also charge a couple hundred dollars to make the walk, north to south only. The wilderness, this part of it anyway, has been commoditised and tamed a little. It is more like the European model of hut-to-hut walking rather than an authentic Australian wilderness experience.
“It’s the peak of the summer walking season and there will be plenty of people on the track if I have an accident”, Suzie tells her friends. That’s true. At this time of year not a day would go by in which she would not see other walkers or share a hut with them at night.
There is wisdom in the warnings
There is wisdom in the warnings of Suzie’s friends, especially for inexperienced bushwalkers. Lone walkers do run into trouble. The search and rescue unit I was a member of once spent a tiring day that started at 4am and finished 16 hours later, trying to track a missing youth who had set out solo on Tasmania’s Central Plateau.
I’ve come across lone walkers on the trails. One I encountered in the national park where Suzie was headed. He was a few hours out of the Lake St Clair trailhead at Cynthia Bay. An American, his pack was full and heavy and looked burdensome. I knew it would lighten over coming days as he ate his way through his food supply, however it seemed he was carrying far too much. He was young and fit-looking even if over-equipped.
Another I encountered when I lived in Tasmania in earlier years. He was a little distance along the track from where that American was, only he was there some decades earlier. We met at Echo Point hut where on sundown he set up his tripod and camera to photograph the scattered clouds turning red over the Traveller Range on the other side of the lake. We spoke awhile. He walked alone because he had to. He was a fireman whose time in the mountains was determined by the odd hours he worked. He came across as one of those quietly tough, independent types. I guess he had to be.
Another I met recently at a friend’s home in Launceston. A man in his late-twenties, solidly built wiht a head of uncombe blonde hair, he looked fit. When we got talking I learned that he had soloed the Overland Track and the trail to Frenchmans Cap, that big block of quartzite in Western Tasmania. He had made other solo trips into the mountain wilderness and now he was thinking of the five or six day walk along the South Coast Track. It’s an isolated trek. There are no roads, no huts after you set out from the Malaleuca trailhead. You’re on your own until you walk into the rangers station at Cockle Creek, the most southerly point of Australia’s road network. How would he go? With his experience, his youth and his apparent fitness he should go okay.
The last time I followed the Overland Track, winter’s snow had melted from the peaks although more would fall towards the end of the walk. That was a sole trek in mid-spring. Marginally warmer than winter in the noutnains, it is a time of unsettle weather. As the moist winds of the Roaring Fourties sweep in from the west they rise over the mountains, their moisture condenses and falls as cold rain, sleet or snow. You have to be equipped to deal with it, physically and mentally. On that trek I saw only a couple people, daywalkers on the first and last days of my time on the Track. Other than that I had the mountain wilderness to myself. It was an enjoyable experience.
Solo walking
Solo walking offers the experience of spending a day, a weekend, a week on the trail by yourself. While safety might not recommend it, there is much that does.
I’ve spent days alone in the bush and mountains. Sure, many of those were just daywalks, not week-long walks like Suzie took. One of the reasons I find solo walking a better option is because I stop to make photographs. Non-photographers find this trying. It can be that you find something to photograph but the light is not right, so you sit and wait for it to improve. Sometimes it doesn’t. I don’t mind sitting in the quiet of the mountains but that’s not for those who want to get to the night’s campsite and to do that as quickly as possible.
Sometimes, solo walkers go for the peace it brings. Even in bad weather there’s something pleasurable about sitting in the doorway of a mountain hut, hands wrapped around a cup of hot, steaming tea, watching the rain teem down and turn the landscape a soggy, misty grey. Experienced alone, the peace of the mountains even when the rain falls or the wind howls is like taking a mental holiday.
Each solo walker’s motivation is their own. Other than those whose work schedule mean that they have to travel the mountains by themselves, some lone walkers seek the solitude it brings. Others do solo trips seeking a sense of adventure that stands in marked contrast to the boring life of the office where they spend their weekdays thinking of escape to the mountains.
Misadventure is a risk
Solo walking is for the experienced bushwalker. We should be aware that it holds the risk of misadventure, especially if we go off the popular trails. We can minimise the risk if we pack reliable bushwalking equipment and know how to use it.
These days you can buy or hire a personal locator beacon (PLB), a small electronic device that uses GPS to mark your location. Have an accident from which you cannot extract yourself, trigger the beacon and it sends a distress signal to a satellite and down to the national rescue coordination centre. The centre contacts local rescue services and soon a helicopter is touching down near you, or, if the weather is bad, a party on foot finds you. PLBs are only to be used when injury prevents us extracting ourself, or when we really are lost and not just geographically disoriented.
I’m writing of Tasmania when I suggest that the basic equipment for a solo day walk should include:
- map and compass, and knowing how to use them
- first aid kit
- food
- water, a litre and a half or two a day replenished along the route
- wet weather parka and overtrousers
- a warm top
- hat, gloves
- a small pocket knife, lighter, small torch or headlamp, some thin, strong cord
- a nylon groundsheet that we can wrap yourself in or pitch as an emergency shelter
- a lightweight tent.
Longer journeys of more than one day require sleeping bag and pad, lightweight tent, a small, lightweight bushwalkers’ cooker and cookpot and enough food and fuel for the time you expect to be out, plus an extra day’s in reserve in case the weather or flooded streams delay us.
Out on the track by ourself we are free to linger, to sit, to stop to photograph. We are free to decide to take a side track or to change our destination. This is the sense of freedom that comes with solo walking. This is the freedom of the hills.
Suzie’s traverse of the Overland Track was uneventful. I think she is now ready for her next solo walk in the mountains.
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