120 Walks In New South Wales (Edition 1)

Tyrone Thomas is well known as a prolific author of walk guides covering most of eastern Australia. As its name suggests, this one describes 120 walks across various areas of New South Wales.

The book starts with a brief section with general information about bushwalking, but this is kept to a minimum. This is good for more experienced walkers for whom such information tends to be repetitive. There is also a table of walks by region, and by level of difficulty

Each walk has most of the usual summary information that you would expect. There is also a last review date, so that you can see how up to date the track notes are. The notes themselves are well written and easy to read, although there are a few errors. Each walk is accompanied by a map. The quality of the maps is unfortunately relatively low, due to the black and white printing and the small size of the book.

All bar one of the walks in the book are loops or out-and-back walks, which makes them easy from a transport point of view. However, this does exclude a lot of good walks where a short train trip or car shuffle can get you from one end to the other.

The walks are spread over NSW without a heavy concentration in any one area or park. The bigger parks do have a significant number of walks, but this is to be expected. Over half of the walks are graded easy, though this tends to be because of the relatively short nature of them.

I found the most disappointing aspect of the book was that out of 120 walks, only thirteen are overnight or longer walks, and seven of those are in just two national parks. I presume that this is to keep the book's appeal open to a wider audience for whom camping is not such a great interest.

Overall, 120 Walks in New South Wales is a useful book for day walkers, particularly if you plan to do some walking more than a few hours from Sydney