Wild Blue Yonder

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Sydney was just 16 years old when George Caley, accompanied by a small dog and three of "the strongest men in the colony," began walking towards the mountains that squatted on the horizon to the west of the rough and rowdy settlement. No one had been able to reach that dusky blue range, let alone cross it, and the headstrong young botanist was filled with "an enthusiastic pride of going farther than any person has yet been." Though he did just that, and managed to get home again, what Caley and his convict assistants encountered during their three-week expedition would permanently damage his health and later lead him to describe the trip as "the Devil's own journey." The wildness of the barely explored country they scrambled and climbed through was "beyond description," he wrote afterwards. "I cannot give you a more expressive idea than traveling over the tops of the houses in a town."

Two hundred years later, a group of bushwalkers stands on a ridge overlooking the dense bush into which Caley and his men descended. Of the 62 km Caley traveled to reach the Carmarthen Hills, as a section of the range was then known, less than a third has been swallowed by farming and suburbia; most of it today lies in the Grose Wilderness - an area protected as part of the Greater Blue Mountains World Heritage Area which covers more than a million hectares of steep gorges, waterfalls, swamps and sandstone escarpments that, in the late afternoon sun, glow the color of warm toffee. From this vantage point, looking west to flat-topped Mount Tomah, the first peak Caley reached, eucalypt-green ridges roll away like swell on an uneasy sea. The leaves of huge gums shimmer in the wind. It looks just as impenetrable as Caley might have seen it, and just as forbidding. "It looks epic down there," someone mutters.

While the self-taught botanist had just a compass and guesswork to guide him, the team - brought together by the Mount Tomah Botanic Garden to mark the bicentenary of his feat by reenacting a segment of it - has all the tools of modern bushwalking. When one of the group injures his leg in a fall, there are mobile phones to summon a car along a fire trail. Caley may have put up with flour, dried beef and the birds the party's dog caught, but these walkers have freeze-dried kangaroo korma and bolognese, fresh snow peas, peanut butter and macadamia nuts. Whenever he gets a chance, Wyn Jones - an expert naturalist and a raconteur known to burst into snatches of song as he ploughs tirelessly through the bush - fires up his coffee maker, the aroma of caffeine mingling with the heady sweet scent of pink boronia flowers.

I also jocosely told them, that when they returned they would know the difference between walking upon a good road and the Blue Mountains; and that it would be easier for to look at them, than to go to them a second time; and that pleasure was unknown to those who had never felt pain.

Pulling ourselves, scratched and sweating, up a rocky bluff out of what Caley named the Devil's Wilderness, it's easy to imagine why he needed to gather his men that night and urge them, as he recounts in his journal, to continue. When they had arrived at the edge of this plunging valley, Caley noted that it seemed "to bid defiance to any man." Going down was brave, says Ian Brown, who leads the Mount Tomah group. A modest, quietly spoken man with a wry sense of humor, he was one of the three men who in 1997 became the first Australians to walk unassisted to the South Pole. "Then again," he adds, "he probably saw that ridge over there as leading to Tomah and thought, if we get across, we'll be right." But Caley was wrong; the ridge on the other side only revealed more ridges and valleys in his path. Two hundred years have not made the descent any kinder; it remains a knee-jarring scramble down to where the Grose River jostles between boulders, and, just as Caley's men did with homemade twine, the team has to lower its packs on rope where the rock face is steepest. The cool Grose waters provide only short relief before a lung-bursting ascent to the top, where Caley and his men tried to quench their burning thirst with native currants.