Fabian's Outdoor Blog

Over the last few weeks, I have done a general cleanup of the blog. It mostly dealt with layout changes and improvements to the way content is presented. The aim was to make it easier to discover all the content, to browse and to read it.

For example, I have …

This is an update of two of my older posts about Australian animals, mainly focused on animals that live close to the water. The first two parts are here: part 1 and part 2. I have added a few more photos of animals that I stumbled upon on bushwalks, or close to home, in parks in and around Melbourne.

Personal locator beacons (PLBs) are satellite devices that transmit a distress signal to search and rescue organisations once they are activated. Because they transmit the signal via satellites, they can be used in remote locations, where no cell phone access is available. Here I explain how they operate and why they are important to have in remote wilderness areas.

In early 2015, I organised a bushwalking trip to Frenchmans Cap, which is the most prominent peak in the Franklin-Gordon Wild Rivers national park in Tasmania. The white quartzite of its summit dome, which looks a bit like a French beret from a distance gave the peak its name and is visible from far away.

In 2014, I spent a few weeks in Alberta, Canada, specifically in and around Banff national park. We scrambled and hiked up various peaks near Banff town, such as Tunnel Mountain, Mt. Rundle and a few others in the close vicinity. Later I visited Mt. Assiniboine on a longer trip.

Over the last months, I have experimented a bit with night and astrophotography. By astrophotography I mean landscape photography of the night sky with different objects in the foreground, see the photos below.

Since my last post about Australian animals at the end of 2013, a lot has happened, and I have seen many more Australian animals either in the wild or animal sanctuaries. While most of them are quite friendly, some can potentially be very dangerous.

Here is an updated list of animals in Australia that I have tried to match up with photos that I have taken.

In the last few days, I moved the blog over from the Perl-based blogging software blosxom, for which I had written various plugins to add missing functionality, to the Python-based static site generator pelican.

The decision was mainly motivated by the fact that I do most of my …

I scrambled up Mt. Rundle in Banff national park in Canada.

I walked the Overland Track, which is a pretty famous long distance hiking trail in Tasmania, Australia. This is a summary of the 8 days, in which I walked 131 km and covered nearly 160 km in total.