From Snow to Ash

The incredible, inspiring story of a solo journey through Australia's toughest and most beautiful hiking trail - the Australian Alps Walking Track - for fans of Into the Wild by Jon Krakauer or Cheryl Strayed's Wild and anyone who dreams of iconic wilderness walks

At the start of the hellish, fiery Australian summer of 2019/20, Walkley Award-winning journalist and suburban dad Anthony Sharwood set off on a journey. Abandoning his post on a busy news website to clear his mind, he solo-trekked the Australian Alps Walking Track, Australia's most gruelling and breathtakingly beautiful mainland hiking trail, which traverses the entirety of the legendary High Country from Gippsland in Victoria to the outskirts of Canberra.

The journey started in a blizzard and ended in a blaze. Along the way, this lifelong lover of the mountains came to realise that nothing would ever be the same - either for him or for the imperilled Australian Alps, a landscape as fragile and sensitive to the changing climate as the Great Barrier Reef.

About the Author

Anthony Sharwood is a Walkley Award-winning journalist specialising in sports, the outdoors, weather and climate. He has spent the last 10 years as a writer and editor on leading Australian news websites, and has also presented television shows, radio programs and a podcast.

A skier, hiker and lifelong lover of Australia's High Country, Ant's brain was pretty much fried after a decade of digital journalism. The Australian Alps Walking Track was a chance to escape, to cleanse, to reset. From Snow to Ash documents that trek. Ant lives with his wife and two teenagers in a Sydney suburb nobody has ever heard of.