Hello, welcome to my tiny corner of the Hive

It's nice to see you

Please, have a seat. Warm your hands by the fire

I'll tell you my plans for the month of September

There's a walking track here in South Australia called the Heysen Trail 🡵

It was marked out and opened in 1978

1200 kilometres in length, it meanders through the countryside from Parachilna Gorge in the North to Cape Jervis in the South

^{_{The full trail}}

Cape Jervis is where you can catch the ferry over to Kangaroo Island, and Parachilna Gorge is just north of the Ikara-Flinders Ranges National Park, where Wilpena Pound is found

I'm going for a walk soon

And it's along this trail

^{_{Totally unrelated photo to break up the text}}

Feel free to stop in over the next few weeks and see how things are going

I'll be happy for the company

I hear that a healthy person can walk the full 1200 kilometre trail in about 60 days

Yeah... that's right, 2 months of solid walking

My plan is to split it into two halves and tackle them separately

This walk will be through the Southern half

I plan on doing the Northern half in 2022

There's a little town called Spalding, which lies more or less in the middle of the trail. I'm planning to start there and head South to Cape Jervis: it'll be a 616 kilometre journey all up

^{_{The full Heysen Trail}}

^{_{The Southern Half of the Heysen Trail from Spalding to Cape Jervis}}

I'm starting this weekend

^{_{Sign in Spalding about the Heysen Trail}}

This will be the greatest physical and mental challenge I have ever attempted

I've been working up to it for the last 3 months, getting my kit ready and training whenever I can. I'm excited and nervous. It'll be huge. Intense. Extremely hard, at times. Once I get going though, I won't be stopping till the very end

Before I do that though, I'm going on another, shorter walk

At the last Adelaide Hive Meetup, @mattclarke asked why I rode my bike there, and I shared my plan to walk the Heysen Trail. It was training, I explained. This then lead on to me talking about the Bundaleer Channel, which Matt was surprised to learn existed

I suppose it is surprising to discover that in 1897 a 30 kilometre long concrete aqueduct was built in rural South Australia to carry drinking water into the Bundaleer Reservoir 🡵

^_Source

But, there it is

There's even a section with an iron aqueduct crossing a valley:

^_Source

No longer in use, replaced by the Whyalla-Morgan Pipeline in the 1940s, the channel has stood through the years as an example of the engineering and ingenuity that built Australia

I am planning to walk the length of it — in reverse — starting from the reservoir

And I need to get a move on! 'Cause I want to be back in Adelaide for the next Hive Meetup, which is in two days. Keen to try a @frogcake, never had one before...

^_Source

@mattclarke and @shaidon both tell me it's worth it

And that the cakes are decent too...

^{_{(my shout)}}

There's a couple of things I want to do while I'm walking the Bundaleer Channel:

1: Recreate Heritage Photos
2: CHANNEL FLAK

1: I have a whole bunch of heritage photos from my time working for the state water authority, and some of them are of the Bundaleer Channel when it was being built

I'll have them with me on my phone, and as I go, I'll be looking to recreate them in the present day. See how that goes

2: When I was a young adolescent, still living at home, I liked to experiment with photo and video cameras whenever I could. One result of all this stuffing around was a tiny video I called FLAK

You can see it here:

This was in 2006. It's nothing special. Pretty rough, hence the name. The rapid, soaring effect is interesting though. The tower structure shown at the end was a Triangulation Station at the top of a hill, just outside the town where I spent most of my childhood. I say was because it's since been pulled down

To make this thing, I used a digital camera on a tripod to take a photo every 10 steps as I walked up the hill. The camera didn't have an option to display a rule-of-thirds grid, so I had to improvise. I stuck two pieces of sewing thread to the back of the camera with tape, across the viewing window in the shape of an 'X'

I then used this 'X' as a guide to keep the trig station in the centre of each frame. This way, it functions as a kind of visual anchor, preventing the footage from devolving into a chaotic mess. Mostly

Once I had all the photos, I animated them into a sequence with a video editing program

I would have liked to get more rotations around the tower, but the camera ran out of memory. This was 2006, recall

So where's all this going? Well, I'll be taking photos during this first walk, with the goal of making another FLAK

A CHANNEL FLAK

^{_{So keep an eye out for that...}}

A cross-section of the Bundaleer Channel looks like:

\__/

This time, I won't have to stick thread to anything. My camera can show a 3 x 3 grid right there upon it's tiny viewing window

If I keep the base of the channel roughly in line with the vertical gridlines on the camera, it should turn out alright. The harder variable to control is the tilt of the tripod. That will undulate a bit as I move through the length of the channel. Most of it should still be pretty flat, but the Bundaleer Channel has been unmaintained for nearly 80 years. Some of the concrete will almost certainly be cracked and subsiding

A few other little things before I take my leave:

I'm going to track both the Bundaleer Channel and the upcoming Heysen Trail walks with Strava, so I can share all the pretty screenshots with you fine folks of Hive. Thanks go to @zo3d for telling me about that phone app

It's also time to get back into the @actifit game — clunky old friend that it is — so I'll be tracking my activity there. Been a while since I've used it. Lately I've been holed up writing, editing and avoiding the rain instead

And finally, thanks to a couple of @platypus-dundee's posts, I've discovered @pinmapple. I'm looking forward to trying that out and geolocating my travels at the end of each day walking

Hopefully I'll remember to do all of that

And I haven't even talked about the magnets yet!

That'll have to be for the next post...