LEAVE NO [ONLINE] TRACE

We’re all familiar with leave-no-trace camping. There are times we need to have the same mindset for the digital impact our outdoor activities can have.

Words & Photography

It was a single line on the bottom of a page in the only English book in the common room of the Spanish-speaking hostel I was visiting.

I would have overlooked it, had my thumb not caught on the page as I flicked through.

A town name and this quote: “Ruins atop a waterfall.”

A bygone traveller had pencilled a faint tick beside the sentence as affirmation—the trace of a past adventure. I was intrigued.

I flipped to the next page, hoping for more. Nothing.

I whipped out my phone and Googled the town name. Nothing.

I Googled the entire sentence. Nothing.

Did this place even exist? I double checked the spelling. No error. What was going on?

When my travel buddy also found no Google results, my adventure senses began tingling. A myth? A lost kingdom? Or maybe a yarn for gullible travellers. I asked the hostel receptionist.

She looked at me quizzically—probably because I slaughtered every single Spanish syllable with my Aussie accent—but the look continued even when I pointed out the town name.

“Not many people go,” she said in broken English. “No gringos know about it. You take taxi.”

I asked her where it was.

“In mountains,” was all she’d say.

I asked to see a picture; she didn’t have one. I probed for more information, but she couldn’t, or wouldn’t, tell me anything else.

JAMES TUGWELL

We hailed a cab, paying a large sum (even after we bartered down the ‘gringo tax’) to be driven one way to a random town “in the mountains.” The taxi driver seemed to know the direction; I was thankful he didn’t Google it.

He drove his 2WD Kia along dirt roads designed for Land Rovers, flinging us from side to side. Traffic disappeared as we left the town, replaced by the occasional villager with a bundle of produce on their head.

After forty minutes in the taxi, the dirt trail we were on ended abruptly. Our driver pulled up beside a decrepit brick building that looked like it was once painted yellow and appeared to be a school, with a caged-in dirt basketball area with broken backboards.

“Here,” the taxi driver said. “Waterfall is that way. I won’t stay for you.”

We paid, and he sped down the dirt road back to town. We stood there with backpacks on, completely alone. We were really at the end of the road.

It was clear why my Google searches had yielded so few results: The town wasn’t on Google maps. Our blue dot hovered aimlessly in the middle of nowhere. There was no town name on my screen.

EDITOR James McCormack talked about keeping secrets in the outdoors. In a world of Instagram and Google, it is hard to be surprised. We’ve seen thousands of images of destinations before we arrive—heck, we even plan itineraries around the pictures we’ve scrolled through.

But these “ruins atop a waterfall” seemed to be one of those precious few secrets. And now, here on our final day in this little town in South America, we were faced with a choice: Do a beautiful hiking route we already knew about, which came with strong recommendations, or chase these potential “ruins atop a waterfall”—recommended by a faint tick and a vague receptionist.

In hindsight, the decision should have been easy. But in that moment, the dilemma was anything but. Time is precious while travelling, and one doesn’t want to waste a day chasing some make-believe story.

Following our driver’s directions, we found a foot trail twisting up a valley. As we lumbered along beside the river, we came upon a village. Locals in traditional dress were hacking the ground with mattocks in what appeared to be a communal working bee. We waved. They didn’t speak English. It makes sense, really, when their address doesn’t exist on Google. I wondered if they even knew of Google.

We lugged ourselves up away from the village, the track getting ever steeper. After two hours, doubt crept in. Just how far were we going to labour along this track because of that guide book? Was the tick a prank by a mischievous, bored traveller? Maybe there’s a reason no one comes here. Maybe there is no waterfall. Maybe it is exceptionally ordinary. At what point do we accept this place just doesn’t want to be found, if it even exists at all?

I couldn’t shake the receptionist’s quizzical look. Maybe we really were crazy. No words of the sort were spoken. A silent look between the two of us shouted our doubts. We needed to find something soon; our faith was faltering.

The river beside us was growing faster, and louder. Was that rapids, or maybe a waterfall? Could it be the waterfall?

One last switchback, and there it was. A pounding, gracious fifty-metre, two-tiered waterfall slicing through the rock above us. It was stunning, like a flowing seam of quartz slicing through the red sandstone cliff face. The crevice it ran through was cloaked in green, and a tropical rainforest surrounded the lagoon at the bottom. It really was the lifeblood of the barren land, the countryside and the village. Like a desert oasis, it was all the more beautiful because we’d just about given up belief it existed. A trickle of hope for our parched faith.

The guidebook promised two things: a waterfall, and ancient ruins. Spray and the thick rainforest canopy blocked our view of the top of the waterfall, but with one item ticked off the list, our hopes were rising. It couldn’t be … could it? If there were ruins up there, it was going to be glorious.

The path spun off into what felt like a hundred more switchbacks, zig-zagging up the hill. We passed a teenage shepherd stewarding a small herd of sheep around the steep slope—sheep that seemed to live on a permanent 45-degree angle. On one of these switchbacks, as we pirouetted, we could finally see the top of the waterfall, where ancient ruins stood proudly, like a jewel in the crown of the waterfall, or as the guidebook put it, “ruins atop a waterfall.”

The moment is forged in my mind forever: standing atop a waterfall that didn’t exist, in the remnants of a room built centuries ago. We spent the afternoon exploring the ruins, overlooking the entire valley the internet didn’t know existed. We had the place to ourselves, if you exclude the local villager we could just make out driving his cow through the valley below us. We were rulers of an ancient empire, conquerors of an antiquated fortress. Did the waterfall have a name? The ruins? The valley? Were we the first gringos to ever see them? We knew our pencil-wielding traveller had gone before us, but in our imaginations we scored second. Our fantasised kingship was all the greater because of it.

When we left, we fortuitously ran into a local driving a Toyota ute. He pulled over before we even asked; it seemed to be a right of passage that any vehicle picked up walkers, because before long the ute tray was crowded with villagers, a goat and a few chickens. We were thankful to make it out alive, and yet we had done so much more. We never did the walk we’d been recommended on Google. I don’t think it could compare.

Yes, it helped the site wasn’t teeming with tourists like so many popular ‘grammable’ sites, but there is something in seeking out the unknown, in finding an unseen treasure, that cannot be replicated with the digital. Our adventure was all the better because I couldn’t find it on Google, and because a small part of my brain always doubted whether it ever truly existed.

The experience led me to adopt a ‘leave no online trace’ policy. As a Wild reader you probably already leave no trace when camping, but what about in the ethersphere? Now that I’m back in Australia, I’ve decided to only post online what already exists online, like walking along a well-marked trail, and leave any secrets I find offline where they are—offline. It’s not that I want no one else to visit them, I would love others to experience the thrill I did, but that thrill comes through the hunt, the doubt, the euphoria of discovery. Through thinking you might just be the first person in the world to find your new treasure. I want to reignite the exhilaration of adventure, the ecstasy of exploration, the delight of discovery. Sometimes the algorithm doesn’t know the best places.

So, no, I am not going to tell you where this hike is, or even what country it’s in; instead, I’ll challenge you to follow the clues, like a single line in a guidebook. Consider this your faint tick.

CONTRIBUTOR: James tried to get his family to love hiking by taking them on a trek. He forgot the matches; they ate raw pumpkin in the cold. His family still don’t like the outdoors, so now he writes about it to try convince them.

Beyond Cradle Mountain, Tasmania’s Overland Track winds south, providing public huts for all walkers, without sky-high fees

Aussie mountaineer Allie Pepper is about to embark on her most ambitious project yet: 'Above the Clouds'. In April, as she prepped for it in Kathmandu, Wild's editor James McCormack caught up with Allie via Zoom to ask her about the project, and about what draws her to the world's highest places.

WILD: Can you tell us what your project is?

AP: To climb all fourteen of the world's 8,000m mountains without additional oxygen, to the true summits, in the world's fastest time.

WILD: What got you interested in mountaineering? Aussies live in a pretty flat country, and alpinism isn't widely spread.

AP: When I came back to Australia in 1999, after travelling around the world and going on a spiritual journey in India, I wanted to have a career. I walked into the TAFE, and picked a brochure that said 'Outdoor Recreation'. Because I was a hippie, and I liked the outdoors, and I wanted to recreate myself, I joined that course. And I loved it. And then one of the instructors at the Australian School of Mountaineering said, “Do you want to go to New Zealand and do a technical mountaineering course?” And I said, “Yes.” And that was when I found my passion. I just loved it.

WILD: What year was that?

AP: 1999.

WILD: And when did you set your sights on this current project of 'Above the Clouds'?

AP: After I did Cho Oyu without oxygen, alone, in 2007. At the time, I wasn't thinking about setting a world record, but I did decide I wanted to do all fourteen 8000ers without oxygen. I was a guide, though, one of the lowest-paid jobs in Australia, and I had no corporate connections, no idea how to form partnerships, nor how to make this amount of money to pay for this project. I didn't believe I was able to, to be honest. Over the years, I've just been [preparing] for this project very slowly. And mostly saving up the money myself. I have the connections now. And [while] I've always had the belief in myself for the climbing, now I have the belief that I'm good enough to be paid as a professional athlete.

WILD: Have those off-mountain elements been some of the most challenging aspects?

without GPS technology it's difficult to know where the summit ridge's highest point is. Even Reinhold Messner never made the true summit of Annapurna. He's kind of excused, though. He summitted in a white out, and didn’t have GPS, so he went to the closest high point on the summit ridge. But it’s a ridge with lots of high points, and he didn’t make the true summit. Only three people in the world have done it to the true summits of all fourteen 8000ers. And the current record to do it [without oxygen] is roughly sixteen years [Ed Viesturs: 15 years, 11 months and 24 days].

WILD: And how quickly do you plan to climb all fourteen?

AP: The plan is to finish by 2025.

WILD: Why is it important to you to not use oxygen?

AP: Because I know I can do it without oxygen. But I don't think I'm any better than someone who does use oxygen, because I believe mountains are for everyone. If you have to use ten Sherpas and fifteen bottles of oxygen, I don't care. I have no opinion on that. But I do want something that is a challenge for me. If I don't have something that I feel motivated and excited by, I'm not going to put in 100%.

WILD: What put the fire in your belly to climb high peaks?

AP: I guess I'm addicted to thin air.

WILD: The headspace that engenders?

AP: Everything about it. Everything. You have to step outside your comfort zone. You have to completely be in the moment. It takes a lot of preparation, mentally, physically, spiritually. There's so much involved in this type of expedition. And it's what I love. And when I'm up there, I know 120% that is where I'm meant to be. I don't feel I should be anywhere else. Learn more about Allie at: alliepepper.com

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