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.

Anthony Sharwood is a bestselling author and Walkley Award-winning journalist. In 2020, he released the acclaimed From Snow to Ash, a love letter to the Australian High Country written after walking the Australian Alps Walking Track. In 2021, he explored the passionate environmental and cultural battle over Australia's wild horses in The Brumby Wars. In 2025, Kosciuszko won third place in the Polish Government's inaugural Best History Book competition.