The Club welcomes additions from members to the Self-guided walks listed on the Club website. Self-guided walk suggestions encourage visitors to the Club website and enhance the Club’s reputation as a source of bushwalking knowledge. Self-guided walks also encourage existing members to maintain their fitness and skills when they are unable, for any reason, to join walks with CBC leaders.
Since self-guided walk information is targeted at the general public, the self-guided walks web page will not use gradings. Instead, the walks will be listed in approximate order of difficulty, and walkers will be encouraged to start easy and work down the list. Self-guided walk descriptions should be considerably more detailed than walk descriptions for activities that have a leader, and should include maps as images, gpx and kml files.
Designing a self-guided walk
Please design self-guided walks with both safety and conservation in mind:
- Easier walks should be on formed tracks or pathways.
- Harder walks should include terrain and/or navigation challenges early in the walk that will show inexperienced walkers the difficulty of the walk; this will avoid a situation where, for example, inexperienced walkers first encounter difficulties three-quarters of the way around a circuit and are tempted to push on.
- All walks should have at least one way to exit that does not require strong navigational skills. For instance, the route could be bounded by easily recognisable landmarks, such as the Murrumbidgee or sign-posted tracks, or some parts of the route could have views of occupied houses or a road.
- The walks should be in less remote areas; no walks listed on the Club’s self-guided walks page should enter designated wilderness areas or environmentally sensitive areas
- Walks should be in parks, reserves or other public land or rights of way.
In addition, to maintain natural values in walking areas, if it becomes evident that any self-guided walk is becoming littered, trampled or in any way suffering environmental damage, the walk will be removed from the CBC website.
Information to include in a self-guided walk
- Summary of the walk, including highlights and length in kilometres and time
- Route description in text
- At least one good quality photograph of the walk, file size at least 500KB
- The route as an image, as a GPX file and as a KML file – yes, all three please!
Please email your offered self-guided walk suggestions to walksec@canberrabushwalkingclub.org The Walks Secretary may, before approving a walk, ask an experienced Club member to vet it.
