I moved to the Blue Mountains almost 30 years ago now, in 1987, with just $40 in my bank account and a newborn babe in my arms. We were offered a six-week house-sit in Wentworth Falls. The offer was a temporary one, but I knew that we had arrived.

View to Mt BanksVeechi Stuart

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Blue Mountains panoramaVeechi Stuart

Sometime during those first few weeks, a neighbour lent me a copy of Jim Smith’s classic walking guide How to See the Blue Mountains. Jim had chronicled pretty much every walking track between Glenbrook and Mount Victoria, and a few more besides. With Jim’s book in hand I’d set out most days, walking for hours and only pausing whenever my son demanded to be fed.

I discovered not only the classic walks such as the National Pass, Perrys Lookdown and Ruined Castle, but many lesser-known tracks as well, such as the network of walks behind the Hydro Majestic in Medlow Bath, and the delightful tracks behind Mt Piddington in Mount Victoria.

Another child arrived, and I stopped roaming quite so far afield. By then we were living right next to the Darwin Trail in Wentworth Falls, and pretty much every day I’d head down there with the kids, and spend some time under the overhang or at the “beach”. "I interviewed Jim Smith recently, and he talks about the value of doing the same bushwalk every day or every week across the years – it’s the best way, he explains, of tuning in to the changes in landscape, the weather, the animals and the seasons.

In 2004, Woodslane Press asked me if I’d write a book about bushwalking in the Blue Mountains, as one of the first two books in their Australian walking series. I hesitated for about a nanosecond before agreeing. That was a great year. Two or three full days a week I’d head off walking, and then two or three days a week I’d spend writing up notes, reading local history, talking to people, figuring out how to create maps, learning how to take landscape photos, and much

more besides. My youngest son was only aged five then, and I can say with pride he did every walk in the book, including the overnight ones.

I think that it was in that year that the Blue Mountains really got under my skin, where I developed a sense of belonging to the land here, and of affinity with the bush. I think that’s the same for many bushwalkers – that sense of calm, that feeling of “rightness” – that comes with a day’s walking. I also discovered the buzz of exploring new tracks, including tracks that have been closed or not maintained by National Parks for many years, such as Mulherans Masterpiece which circles from Rocket Point along the top of Kings Tableland, or the Horse Track which zigzags from Evans Lookout down into the Grose Valley.

My book, Blue Mountains Best Bushwalks, has sold over 50,000 copies now, and is in its third edition. With this new edition, my idea was to create a partner website, so that each walk from my book has its own page on my website, complete with track facts, a description and photos.

The neat thing about this website is I can add more walks than are possible to fit into the printed version (which is already slightly overweight, with 66 walks and 20 walk variations). For example, my husband and I recently went out to the very end of Mt Hay Road, where we walked to the top of Mt Hay, looking down into the Grose Valley. The views were extraordinary. Similarly, the other day, I took a friend on another track (that I also can’t fit into my book) called Stonehaven Pass, a 40-minute circuit that starts off the Den Fenella Track in Wentworth Falls. Stonehaven Pass is so accessible, yet so little known. Even on public holiday weekends when people almost queue to

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exit from the Valley of the Waters, I know I can quietly pick my way along this Pass and won’t see a soul.

The thread running through the last 30 years in the mountains has been sharing my love of walking with my kids. They might groan and grumble sometimes, remembering the time we went camping without quite enough food, or the time we went searching for glowworms in the freezing July pitch darkness, or the time we picked our way back in the dusk, with only fireflies pinpointing the way. But for me, it has been really important that my kids build a connection with the bush. They are the future custodians of our bush tracks, and the ones who will understand how precious this heritage is.

These days, I work at Varuna House (the National Writers Centre), and I relish hearing the stories of how people connect with the land around them, and how they relate the stories of this connection. I’d love to hear from you about the tracks you love, and how you came to love bushwalking.