Getting trail fit

Finding motivation

I hadn’t been out in the bush for a couple of weeks. While I was still out taking photos every week, my motivation to explore has been lacking. It happens the same time every year; the weather warming, the vegetation drying, winter trips not undertaken.

This is the season, however, to plan for the summer ahead. I have some big walks planned and hope for a few more. And this provided my motivation to get out – to make sure I’m trail fit and have my gear dialled in.

---

So it was that on Saturday night, a couple of weeks ago, I was going through the usual dilemma of consulting weather forecasts and wondering where to go, and I decided to throw on a pack and do a walk I had done long ago, the Myrtle Gully Track.¹

My aim was not photography but to get some time in the bush and build my trail fitness. With my dodgy knees, I can no longer consistently run (by far the best training option), so my aim is to spend time on the trail to ensure I can comfortably walk 20 kilometres a day with a 15kg pack for multiple days.

Regular readers will know my mantra that I go to photograph the landscape, not walk it. But even a relatively short 10-15km day, and a couple of hours photography before and after the day’s walking with a full pack, can be exhausting, especially as multiple days accumulate. And being tired is not conducive to slowing down and being intentional about the images taken.

There have been times when I have walked past potentially great images because I am too tired / wet / dehydrated / cold / running behind time / etc. It is why fieldcraft is the first of my categories of skills a landscape photographer needs. And the wilder you go, the more skills required.

An ideal day for me would be about 10km of walking with a pack – which could be 4-6 hours on steep or rough tracks.² But for my kind of trips, I feel I need the capability to do 20-25 km in a day (10 hours of rough walking) to efficiently get into an area or quickly get out in an emergency.

Despite my fully loaded pack and camera bag, I immediately felt a weight lift from my shoulders as I headed up the track. I needed this. I could feel myself slipping into that flow state resulting from mild exertion and constant scanning for compositions.

The track is rough and muddy as it follows Myrtle Creek up the hill. Only a couple of hundred metres in and I spot a grand old Myrtle Beech in flower. The flowers are small and provide a nice yellow contrast to the tiny dark green leaves. I have tried to photograph this tree before, but I haven’t been able to find a composition. Some things are not meant to be photographed.

Although I am not prioritising photography, I pause a few times to take photos. Getting smooth and efficient is important. I keep my camera and lenses in a Lowe Pro camera bag in front of me so I don’t need to take off my pack to access my camera. And I am practising using my trekking poles crossed over as a camera support, rather than getting out my tripod – I am consistently getting sharp images at ¼ second with image stabilisation compared with 1/20 second handheld.³

I spot a particularly nice Myrtle Beech, its moss covered trunk glowing in the backlit light. I head off track down the steep hillside, taking a variety of compositions. I worked the scene pretty hard but struggle to minimise the messiness of the ferns and deadfall. The image below is my favourite as it shows the terrain nicely. I will need to come back here and perhaps walk back down along the creek.

Back on the track, I focus on walking. The gradient is enough to get a sweat going and everything is feeling good. The trail leaves the creek behind and heads up into drier forest. Now dominated by eucalypts, the understory has more bushes (many covered in flowers at this time of year) with occasional patches of tree ferns.

I reach the high point (an extra out and back section to increase the distance) just as a misty rain comes through. It provides some nice light to provide some separation, even if I am not in the best location.

As I make my way back to the car, I drop off the track one more time to explore an expansive area of tree ferns. I love this wandering around, looking closely at the landscape, searching for a composition. Mostly they don’t really work of course, but that’s not the point. It is the engagement with country that is important. It is seeing things that others don’t notice, capturing a moment in what feels like a timeless landscape.

Another 5 or 6 walks like this and I will be ready for summer.

1. The Wirrawilla Rainforest Walk, near Toolangi, provides a lovely, wheelchair friendly track through a beautiful slice of temperate rainforest. From here there are two well known loop trails, Myrtle Gully Track and Tanglefoot Track, which are each 10-14 kilometres in length as they make their way out of the rainforest and up the side of Mt Tanglefoot and Mt St Leonard and into Mountain Ash forest – classic Central Highland landscapes.

2. There are a variety of Rules of Thumb about calculating walk times. While I can easily walk 5+ km/hour without pack, I assume an average of 3km/hour, plus 1 hour per 600m continuous climb, on a reasonable trail over a day’s walking with a full pack. This gives a conservative estimate, noting that I often lose half an hour if I stop to photograph a scene.

3. I know of other people who can get sharp images handheld at lower speeds but I just can’t get consistent results any slower.