About the site

Bushwalking NSW

Bushwalking NSW was established in 2002 to deal with the lack of online track notes for bushwalkers in NSW. It has grown over the past 16 years to cover over 100 walks across some 23 national parks. The site now gets over 650 unique visitors a day, and serves over 1300 pages a day. All of the track notes have been written by Tom Brennan (me) and I have walked all of the tracks for the walks. Many of the walks have been walked on a number of occasions, and the track notes updated as a result.

The tracks on the maps have been verified on the ground, and in many cases are more accurate than on the official maps. Many of the tracks do not even appear on official maps.

While not part of Bushwalking NSW, you may also like to look at bushwalking or canyoning photos.

Note that this website has no relationship with the NSW Confederation of Bushwalking Clubs, which was renamed Bushwalking NSW in 2013. Very confusing!

Why online?

Track conditions change. Bushwalking guide books go out of date. The internet is a fast publishing mechanism. It enables changes to track notes and corrections to made quickly, and without reprinting the entire book.

The internet is also a cheap publishing mechanism, both for the publisher and the reader. That said, it is not free. The ads that you see on the site (assuming you don't have an ad blocker on) are an attempt to defray some of the hosting costs.

If you find any errors on the site, please contact us to report them.

History

The inspiration for this site came from the Australian Bushwalking and Camping Reference Site that was run by Richard Merry for a number of years in the late 1990s. He wrote that site from scratch, with walk contributions from a number of people (myself included). The concepts behind his site have been incorporated into the Bushwalking NSW site, and I acknowledge his contribution.

Technology

For those who are interested in these things, the site is mostly driven off a back-end MySQL database, using the server-side scripting language PHP to generate the pages. The code has been developed from scratch by me. The site now uses the Twig templating engine, which means most changes to layout can be accomplished quickly by editing one or two files.

The site is (since 2016) in HTML5. The site does use Javascript to improve the user experience, but with the exception of maps for walks, it should still work reasonably with Javascript disabled.