I’m Stevie, the visual storyteller at Mont Adventure Equipment. Working full-time within the brand means my role extends beyond carrying a camera, it’s about helping tell the stories behind our product, our landscapes and the experiences that shape them. This trip into the Budawang National Park began as a mission to photograph new product releases, but beneath the brief sat a much more personal objective.
The Budawangs have long been my closest playground from Canberra. Since discovering the outdoors in the early 2000s, this landscape has become a constant in my life, a place I return to not only for adventure, but for perspective. Like many who spend time here, I’ve grown to respect both its beauty and its complexity. The Budawangs don’t reveal themselves easily, and perhaps that’s part of what has kept drawing me back for all these years.
Some assignments stay with you long before the camera ever comes out.
This trip started as a content mission for Mont’s latest product releases. On paper, it was a straightforward brief. Head into the mountains, shoot the gear in the environments it was designed for and return with assets that reflected the season ahead.
But the truth is, this trip meant something more to me.
For years I had carried an old photograph in the back of my mind. A photograph taken some time around 1970, showing The Castle from an angle I had never seen before. The Budawangs are full of iconic locations and well-known viewpoints, but this image felt different. Untamed. Mysterious. A perspective that seemed to exist outside the familiar trail lines and guidebook pages.
I had no idea where it had been taken.
No grid reference. No description. Just terrain, instinct and the quiet belief that somewhere out there, beyond the classic walks and known lookouts, a different view still existed.
That idea stayed with me.
As the visual storyteller behind much of Mont’s imagery, I spend a lot of time thinking about authenticity. Outdoor brands talk about it often, but for us, it has always meant something tangible. We don’t stage mountain experiences in places disconnected from reality. We don’t create artificial hardship or manufacture adventure for the sake of a campaign.
We go where the gear belongs.
And sometimes, those assignments become adventures of their own.
The Budawangs don’t hand over their rewards easily.
Anyone who has travelled through this country knows that already. The landscape is beautiful, but it asks something of you in return. Thick and unforgiving vegetation swallows progress. Tracks disappear beneath scrub. Rope climbs, chimneys, chains and exposed rock demand patience and focus.
Navigating here is rarely straightforward.
Our small crew of Sam, Grace and I headed in carrying heavy packs loaded with camera gear, camp equipment and the product we had come to document. The mission was equal parts content production and exploration, with weather already threatening to complicate things.
Complicate them it did.
Rain settled over us for an entire day. Temperatures dropped to three or four degrees overnight. Wind swept through camp and turned simple tasks into deliberate ones. Moving through the scrub became exhausting, and several wet rock monoliths demanded careful climbing while hauling loaded packs.
By the first night, we had failed.
The route I believed would take us close to the viewpoint simply wasn’t giving way. Darkness settled in while rain tumbled through the trees and we eventually surrendered to a camp well into the night, accepting that the mountain had won the first round.
And honestly, that felt appropriate.
The Budawangs have a way of reminding you that progress is never guaranteed.
What stayed with me most from those difficult hours wasn’t the weather or the fatigue, but the trust within the group. Exploratory trips ask a lot from everyone involved, especially when the outcome is uncertain. Yet Sam and Grace backed the vision completely, navigating, encouraging and somehow keeping spirits high even when conditions felt questionable.
Sam, as always, went above and beyond.
Good food in wild places changes everything, and he has a gift for creating it. Between searching for scarce water sources and dishing up meals that felt impossibly good for how remote we were, camp became something more than shelter. It became part of the experience itself.
By the second day we continued the search.
Multiple times we convinced ourselves we had found it.
A rocky perch would appear promising, only for thick scrub to interrupt the line of sight. Another location hinted at possibility before branches and vegetation closed the view again. Hours passed like this, chasing fragments and trying to read the landscape like a puzzle assembled decades earlier.
And then something shifted.
We reached a location that immediately felt different.
Not familiar.
Not identical.
Just… right.
The truth is, we never found the exact viewpoint from the old photograph. Perhaps we came close. Perhaps we didn’t. I prefer not knowing.
Because what we found instead felt entirely our own.
As the sun dropped toward the western face of The Castle, the landscape transformed. Orange light spilled across the rock and ignited the escarpment in a way that felt almost surreal. After days of uncertainty, wet climbing and stubborn navigation, the view opened itself to us all at once.
It was more beautiful than I had imagined.
I remember standing there with the camera and feeling briefly overwhelmed by the scale of it. Not because we had solved some mystery or completed an objective, but because the place still held surprise.
In an age where nearly every landscape can be searched, tagged and pinned to a map within seconds, that feeling matters.
Discovery still exists.
And perhaps that is what drew me to the original photograph all along.
That matters to us.
For Mont, field testing and storytelling are deeply connected. When we photograph product in harsh environments, it is not about creating an illusion of performance. It is about documenting real use in real places. The gear earns its story through the conditions it encounters.
This trip reminded me of that again.
What began as a product shoot became something harder to define equal parts assignment, field test and personal pursuit.
And when we finally returned to the car, tired and weathered, we all agreed on the same thing:
This had been a proper adventure.
The kind that stays with you.
The kind you talk about for years.
There is one final thing worth saying.
We won’t reveal exactly where this place is.
Not out of secrecy, but out of respect.
Some places don’t need pins dropped on maps or names attached to them. Part of what makes the Budawangs special is the sense that discovery still exists there, that adventure still asks something of us.
We never seek to exploit wild places.
For me, this view is more meaningful left unknown.
The photograph that inspired the journey may have led us into the mountains, but the destination became something entirely our own.
And perhaps that is how it should remain.
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Probably the most important thing to pack though is a good amount of respect for the environment, commonsense and experience
Summer in Tasmania’s mountains presents the walker with a multitude of flowers, ranging from the prickly Richea Scoparia to the diminutive flowers of the remarkable Tasmanian Cushion Plant.
The pines were extensively studied some time ago and the conclusion was that they are up to 1,600 years old and quite possibly far older as the original pines may be long gone and the descendants may even date back to the Last Glacial Maximum about 20,000 years ago.
