You may be wondering what caused me to create this enormous Guide? !

In mid-2006, I was with my walking friend of some 20 years, Mick. We were out west, in the Mt Cole State Forest, and Mick said "Why not make up a Website with the walks' descriptions and links to Parks Victoria Track Notes and your Photo Albums?"

I thought about this for a while and said OK - give me a week or two to sort out the site objectives and archtecture...!

So I played around with a few Website designs and created the site, initially calling it a "Bushwalking Diary".

There was an evolutionary process, and the site changed its title, structure, layout and objectives as the project developed.  

The idea of calling it a "Guide" was preferred to "Diary", as the latter implied chronological content, which I am already doing with a separate Weblog.

I did not want to make the project into a full-scale "Directory", as various commercial  print publications do that, and it is not feasible to review and/update the walks!

Furthermore, I had long felt that a need existed for some sort of Internet reference to walks in a geographical layout, with everything at a single Website, including a Search Engine.

This also has the added advantage that the Photo Albums can be viewed and searched from within the Guide!

There is a photo album for each walk in the Guide - there are over 10,000 images,  so that will keep you entertained in a spare moment...!

There have been a few disasters for some walks, which don't get mentioned in the Guide, such as driving on narrow unmade roads only to reach locked gates with no turnaround space and then having to go back! Then there was the time when the tailpipe broke off, and another occasion when the car became stranded on a rock on a rough track in the Brisbane Ranges and we had to physically bring it back to solid earth....

Another event was when we found ourselves a little "bushed" in the Mt Cole State Forest - we had walked down a signed track, only to lose it, and the markers,  in thick ferns and bush. We managed to backtrack - on another trip, we discovered that the Track had been closed, but the authorities had only erected a "Track Closed" sign at one end!

Perhaps some of those embarrassing could be included at a later time!!!

Thanks, Mick, for your encouragement during the development of the Guide.