Transcript 0:00 There's a call I made on a hike a few weeks ago that I'd never really made in 35 years of walking. I bailed on a walk before it even started, like properly bailed. 0:10 Told my mates we were out for the weekend, and an hour later, well, I was walking right back in. So in this video, I'm gonna show you what happened and the move most hikers don't even know that they have. 0:23 So a few weeks ago, I had an annual trip planned with a few mates in Southwest Tasmania, starting in a place called Mount Field. 0:30 The plan was to head down a day early with my mate Matt and finally bag a peak called Florentine Peak. It's the only peak in the Mount Field area that I hadn't done. 0:41 Then we'd meet the rest of the crew the next morning and roll into a three-day walk together to do a couple of nice other peaks. 0:48 The week before, there'd been a big autumn snow dump here in Tasmania, but I'd been watching the webcams, and the snow had been melting off all week. 0:56 It looked pretty manageable, and I know that area pretty well, so I had a solid feel for what we were rolling into, so I thought. The walk in. 1:05 We drove down, parked the car, and headed in, heading in for an area called K-Coal, near a little tarn that I like to camp at called Clem's Tarn. Normally about a one-and-a-half to two-hour walk for me. 1:17 Pretty easy, pretty cold, pretty windy, but we were prepared with a full winter kit on our back. About an hour and a half in, the snow started getting deep. 1:26 Not dusting the track deep, but knee-deep, sludgy, and on steep ground. Halfway in, I started thinking, "Maybe we won't get to the peak today." 1:35 And by the time we crawled into K-Coal, the light was gone, and the snow was way too soft to think about going up a mountain then. So we bunkered down and, well, then it really started. The blizzard. 1:48 So it then started to blizzard all night, and I mean, really went blizzarding. Like, lying there listening to it, and I was already running through the numbers in my head. 1:57 Tomorrow morning, we're walking back out in worse conditions than what we walked in. 2:01 There's no peak to bag here, that, that's out of the question, and the rest of the trip we'd planned with the other guys, well, that was at around the same altitude, if not a bit higher, and maybe to 30 to 50 kilometers away as the crow flies. 2:15 But that route also had a long stretch of exposed ridgeline facing right into where this weather was coming from. 2:22 If it was like this here, where we were camping now, the snow up on that ridge was gonna be diabolical and way worse than what we were sitting in here now. 2:31 So by the time Matt and I went to bed, we'd, we'd basically made the call. We were out. Like, we're not, we're not just out of Florentine Peak, which we'd come here to do, we were out for the whole weekend. 2:41 Like, it's, it's done. The bail. So we crawled out of bed the next morning after listening to this blizzard all night, and the snow level had just gone mad [laughs]. We, we had way more than the night before. 2:55 So there wasn't much snow here yesterday. Now there's a lot. There's quite a lot of snow. Like, that drift wasn't there. There was a bit of a drift. That drift there, that shelf was there, but none of this was there. 3:11 Oh, I've just realized that. I pulled my phone out and messaged the other guys via Starlink, which by the way, the messaging on the new Starlink connected phones is crazy fast compared to something like a Garmin InReach. 3:23 I still carry the InReach as well, but just because I trust it for redundancy. But the Starlink message landed instantly with an instant response, which was pretty crazy. First time I've tested it out. 3:34 But anyway, we told them, "We're out. We're not coming on the trip. We're happy to still meet you at Maydena for a beer before we head home, but the weather is crazy out here. Let's not bother." 3:44 We then walked out for three hours through knee to waist-deep snow and continual snow showers. Now, normally that walk takes me about an hour to an hour and a half. 3:52 By the time we got back to the car, though, it was actually pretty mild. The snow line was only about 100 meters in elevation above where we'd parked the car, so we're all good at the car park. 4:01 So the second we dropped below the snow line, well, it was like nothing is even going on up there. 4:06 We peeled off the wet kit, and I had a full dry kit ready to go because I always carry a second kit of gear, basically, when I'm doing a two-walk trip like this. We switched over clothes and drove off. Trip done. 4:20 We're heading home. So in my head, I'd already planned the rest of the weekend at home with my family. So had Matt. He was sorta thinking of what he was gonna do that weekend. We had it sorted. The pub. 4:30 So we pulled into Maydena to meet the other guys, have a bit of a debrief, thinking, "Yep, we'll all just drive home after this." 4:36 They'd come up from Hobart, which is a relatively short trip for them, and we rolled in at around 11:30 AM after they'd been there an hour. 4:44 Beautiful spot, and by the way, the mountain bike park in Maydena here in Tasmania, if you ever wanna stop, great spot to stop, have a bit of food, have a bit of a beer, and just chill out next to a fire. 4:55 And the other guys, well, they're there waiting for us, beer in hand, having a quiet lunch, and they'd obviously been there a while hatching a plan. 5:02 So we stood by the fire, drying our gear out, drying ourselves out, ordered a beer, ordered a burger, and we told them about the snow experience we'd just had. 5:11 Then they say, "Well, we obviously aren't doing the original walk. Bit crazy, but we've got a couple of other ideas." 5:18 Now, they had been at Maydena for the last hour and had been thinking long and hard, as well as on the drive up there. 5:24 They started pitching a couple of alternate ideas, and one of them was at a lake nearby, about an hour's drive away. Beautiful campsite, easy walk in, low altitude, so the snow wasn't gonna be a problem at all. 5:37 Now, in my head, I was figuring it was two, maybe two-and-a-half-hour walk in. Definitely something that I could cope with. And as they were describing it, I realized I hadn't actually been into that lake for 25 years. 5:49 It's a place I used to love goingNow, I'd been standing there an hour earlier convinced that this trip was over, that it was finished. But by the time we'd finished that burger and the beer, well, I was back in the game. 6:01 Oh, and a quick thing while I think of it, if you wanna know whether your own trip plan has the room in it to handle a call like this where the original plan goes sideways and you need a real second move, then I've got a free readiness quiz linked in the description down below. 6:16 It takes about two minutes and shows you the gaps before you even leave the house. Link's down in the description. Check it out. What we actually did. After our beer and burger, we headed off. 6:26 Different route, similar area, different feel. Now, when we got to the start of the new walk, it was drizzling rain, but there was no snow in this area at all. It felt bright. 6:35 You could see snow up on the distant peaks, but even that was starting to melt off. So we walked a couple of hours in, set up camp by the lake, and had a quiet evening, very happy with our decision. 6:47 Next morning, we got up, did a full day walk, out for about seven or eight hours, climbed a mountain I hadn't been on top of in 25 years, got up to some nice alpine meadow sort of vegetation, tiny bit of snow on top, but it was just right. 7:01 Then back to camp and had a lovely afternoon and evening by the lake again. On the final day, we walked out under a full bluebird sky, one of those days where you can see 100 miles in every direction. 7:14 I saw peaks I'd climbed before, got to stare at a stretch of country that's really just my favorite place in the world, southwest Tasmania. 7:22 And standing there on the hillside, just looking out, I was just so happy I had not quit on that walk. 7:28 That walk out on that last day alone, just that couple of hours walk, wasn't even two hours walk, made the snow days at K-Col worth it. 7:35 That's why I get out hiking, you know, for views like that, for moments like that, for feeling like that, open Tasmanian wilderness and just being out there in it. The move most hikers don't make. So here's the thing. 7:48 Most hikers think there's two options when a hike goes sideways. You can push through or quit, stick to the plan or pack it in. But there's a third move, pivot. Bailing on a plan is not the same as bailing on a trip. 8:02 You can be out on the original walk and still be in for a different walk. And in my experience, the pivot trip is sometimes the better trip. The lake I hadn't been to in 25 years is a perfect example. 8:15 The trick is that the pivot only shows up if you stay open. If we had driven home from Maydena that day, the trip, well, it was done. 8:24 Instead, we stood by a fire for an hour with a beer and a burger and warmed up a bit and let our mates picture some alternate trips. The trip at that time was just on pause. 8:34 Now, an important caveat, I'm not saying just go and do an unplanned trip at the drop of a hat. The walk we ended up doing was one I'd done several times before. 8:42 It was already on my list of backup plans I keep in my head for that part of Tasmania. If I hadn't been in there before, I'd probably have been a bit more reluctant unless I was with someone who knew the country well. 8:54 Worst case, we would have just sat in our tents by the lake for two nights and that would have been fine too, just absorbing some nature. Now, the other thing that helps is the people you walk with. 9:05 Our group is all local Tasmanians. We've all lived here pretty much our entire lives and we know this country really well. 9:12 So when something falls over, somebody in the group can usually pull a backup walk out of their head that we can trust. That's accumulated knowledge of the area, not luck. 9:22 If your hiking group has that depth, last minute changes can really work well. If they don't, build your own backup plan list before you even leave home. So next time the original plan dies on you, don't drive home yet. 9:36 Stop, eat something, maybe have a beer, listen to what else is on offer. And if the alternative is somewhere you know, somewhere you trust, well, the pivot, it might be the best walk of your year. 9:47 Now, the thing about pivots is they only work if you've planned the original trip with enough room to absorb things going wrong in the first place. 9:55 If your trip is locked in tight with no slack, there's no third move available and that's the part that quietly kills most big walks before they even start. 10:04 So check out this video up here next where I break down why most bucket list hikes fail because once you can see the trap, the trip you're planning right now, well, it gets a lot more flexible.
