Publishing route information

Publishing track notes and making route information public has long been a fairly divisive topic in the local canyoning community.

There is a range of views from the publishing of little or no information to that of making just about everything public.

My personal view, which is the position I've taken on my canyoning website, is not to add to the information that is already publicly available. Note that this mainly applies to the Greater Blue Mountains area, where there are already many canyons with published descriptions. So:

• where there is significant information already available:
  • for more popular canyons, you will mostly likely find relatively detailed track notes
  • for less well known canyons there may just a grid reference and a brief summary
• where there is brief information or just a grid reference, you will probably find a trip report with photos, and possibly a grid reference, but no detailed track notes
• where there is essentially no information, you will probably get some photos and a vague trip report, probably only naming the area rather than the specific canyon(s)

This attempts to balance the desire of people for information, with the need to minimise impact in less well known areas and to allow opportunities for other people to rediscover new canyons for themselves.

There are 100+ canyons with reasonably detailed descriptions in published guides, and 60 of those are on my website. There are at least another 100 canyons with grid references or brief descriptions in published guides. The vast majority of canyoners will not have done all of these. By the time they have, they should be well equipped to explore for canyons on their own. There is also a wealth of information on the internet, in the form of reports and photos, that provide pointers of where to look for new canyons.

The reasons for my position on publishing/publicising are:

1. Impacts
2. Exploration and discovery

Impacts

As far as impacts go, the canyons themselves are often reasonably hardy environments. Being regularly flooded with water tends to make for a certain resilience!

If you took away the slings, the most significant damage you could see in many canyons is to the moss on the rocks, and in some more popular canyons, rope pull damage to the rock itself.

The major impacts tend to come on the way in and on the way out - tracks to the canyon, tracks from the canyon, damage to pagodas and delicate rock formations, tracks and erosion along the creek bank. This is where detailed track notes are damaging, as they typically encourage the followers of those notes to use the same route.

The more remote wilderness canyons are reasonably resistant to impact. The difficulty of access means that most canyoners will not bother to visit, and traffic remains low. Canyons close to civilisation, with easy access will be more impacted if publicised.

Canyons in smaller creeks are also susceptible to damage from canyoners, as they are less exposed to flooding.

There have been a number of canyons in smaller creeks that have become a lot more well-known in the past 10 years. I won't name them, as some still fly under the radar. But the erosion in the canyons and damage to ferns and plants is concerning, and I hope that people refrain from publicising these creeks.

The damage to the surrounding areas is not theoretical. I have seen a track form to a newly publicised canyon in less than a year. I have seen the broken pagodas around some of the canyons on the Newnes Plateau. I have seen the vegetation on the side of one small canyon disappear in a few seasons. Some areas and canyons cannot handle large numbers of visitors.

Exploration and discovery

Publishing information and publicising canyons diminishes the opportunity for exploration and discovery.

Discovery is not simply about the canyons. It is also about what you might find on your way there and your way back. Passes, camp caves, rock arches, art sites, waterfalls, cliffs and chasms. If you follow a detailed set of notes then you will find what the author found.

Publishing information particularly diminishes wilderness. One of the ideas of wilderness from a recreation point of view is that there is a bit of mystery left out there. It has not been documented out of existence. This is a particular challenge in the internet age, where once posted, information never disappears.

The Wollemi Wilderness in NSW is the largest declared wilderness area in NSW, indeed, in Australia. This is where the majority of the unpublicised canyons in the Blue Mountains lie, and the lack of published information makes it one of the greatest areas in Australia to explore. Most of the canyons have probably had less visits than the summit of Mt Everest!

One of the beauties of discovery is that even if someone has already discovered something, if there's no information disseminated, then it can be rediscovered by someone else.

A little story from my own experience ...

On a trip one September in the Coorongooba area, on the second last day we dropped into a creek we knew nothing about, late in the afternoon, hoping to quickly find a camp cave. Instead we quickly hit a canyon! Hoping we would make it through fast, we pressed on, abseiling twice in the gloom, finally having to swim (no wetsuits!). With us cold, and it almost dark, we found ourselves facing another drop. Luckily there was an overhang just above the creek, and we set up camp. The rain started to fall, and thunder and lightning crashed around for some time. Fortunately the creek didn't rise, and we were able to complete the canyon the next morning. We had to go to the loo in plastic bags and carry them out in my billy, to avoid polluting the canyon!

The point of the story is that if we had all the beta on this creek, would we have even entered it late in the day? Almost certainly not. While we surely knew we were not the first to descend this canyon, we were still able to have a great adventure.

I hope that others in the future will still be able to have similar adventures.

Canyon Names

I generally avoid putting names of new or wilderness canyons on my website. In most cases I refer to the general area (eg Wolgan Canyoning). For some easily accessible canyons, I will generally just refer to the trip as "Blue Mountains Canyoning".

This was mainly influenced by an incident quite some years ago.

Rachel and I headed out to look for at that time a relatively unknown canyon in a more popular area. I had a few pieces of beta, including the name. I hadn't left details of exactly where we were going with anyone, so I left the name of this canyon in a logbook near to where we were starting. I was subsequently grilled about details of this new canyon by a noted guidebook writer who had found the name in the log book, and I found it difficult to avoid divulging more info than I wanted to provide, without being quite rude.

It is much harder for people to ask "Where is XXX Canyon?" if it hasn't actually been referred to by name. It's also hard to publicise a canyon with no name!

I generally only put a name for lesser known canyons if I feel the name is sufficiently well known in the canyoning community eg Nightmare.

Policies and guidelines

The NPWS guidelines on "adventure sports" includes the following, slightly changed from earlier versions:

Be mindful not to publicise 'new' canyons or routes, particularly those in wilderness areas, to preserve opportunities for discovery and to minimise environmental impacts.

It's particularly worth pointing out that the term NPWS use is "publicise", and not "publish".

The Natural Areas Policy of Bushwalking NSW (formerly the Confederation of Bushwalking Clubs NSW, the parent body of bushwalking clubs in NSW and ACT) includes the following:

Printed guides
Natural Areas - Detailed route guides are permissible so long as they give due regard to protection and conservation.
Wilderness Areas - Limited to general description of the terrain etc, with only broad suggestions concerning route possibilities. Where a well established route passes through wilderness, supportive material should contain sufficient detail to guide the walker through.