Braving raging rivers, thunder storms and giant snow lopes, Robert Manning is thru hiking his way home from the Mexican border to Canada on the Continental Divide Trail – a journey of 3,100 miles (nearly 5,000 km) through the states of New Mexico, Colorado, Wyoming, Idaho and Montana.

Some mornings are so cold that he wakes up to frozen socks and has to warm them up with a brisk hike.

“You’re sitting on a rock on a ridge top and looking back over this huge vista and realising you just walked across the whole thing, how grandiose it is. But the main memory stickers are the terrifying moments that you just somehow managed to get through,” says the adventurer.

The general mantra for thru hiking the CDT is to embrace the brutality.

“I’m starting to understand what they mean.”

Robert says that for about eight hours a day he feels nice and warm in his tent, another eight hours a day he is somewhere fun, and the remaining eight hours are spent stuck in a situation he’s trying to get out of.

“Hip deep in a snow bank, or thunderstorms chasing you around, but it all passes and it’s a fun story to tell.”

Being so far away from the daily bustle and focused solely on the weather, trail safety, the next river crossing  or ascent brings things down to the essentials for him.

“It’s kind of like an analogy to packing. First you pack all this stuff and a month in you realise 90 per cent of it you don’t need […], so the mind set it similar and you realise what matters and doesn’t really matter.”

“Also your mind just wanders and you think all these crazy thoughts as you’re tracking through the bush and you get the universe all figured out, and the next day you forget what you thought,” he laughs.

Having been a forest fire fighter for 17 years and holding a commercial pilot license, Robert has solid outdoors and map reading skills and knows how to deal with dicey situations.

However, he doesn’t carry an emergency beacon and his family only knows he’s made it through the next stretch when he gets to a town and can update his facebook page with pictures and stories of the days past.

Despite the remoteness of the trail, though, hikers do meet each other frequently as there’s only a limited time corridor this trail can be done in.

“There’s only been a few days where I’ve been hiking entirely on my own.”

As he comes through Leadville, CO, he has completed about 1,300 miles of his epic adventure and is down to one set of clothes with various layers.

“I just wear the same thing everyday, which is great freedom. I don’t have to choose anything.”

The one set includes his cycling shorts that co-function as underwear.

Robert reckons river crossings double up as underwear washing days when thru hiking.

I think he made that part up because I don’t remember a wall of funk greeting me when we met, but then again, he had probably already showered and washed his clothes by then – wearing only his rain coat so that everything else could go in the washer.

Having only one set of clothes helps keep the weight down. Starting out with a big pack and gear for all sorts of eventualities, Robert says he soon sent parcels to his sister, realising he had completely overpacked.

“I had a knee brace in there, which, if I needed a knee brace, I wouldn’t be able to be on the trail.”

Gaining experience as he went, he improved his planning skills to the degree that he can now largely avoid emergencies.

“Instead of packing for emergencies, you just preplan and avoid emergencies, which is probably one of the best things to keep the weight down.”

His pack is now down to 20 pounds, excluding food and water.

And despite all the challenges, Robert is keen to extend his time on the trail. Having bought an orchard in Canada, he has time to hike while the trees grow and is moving faster than planned, giving him extra room to play.

The CDT runs to the Glacier National Park on the US border with Canada, but his true goal is a Canadian mountain his parents used to take him to as a kid.

“They are both teachers, so they had the summers off and they’d stick us all in a van […] and bring us out to the mountains for a month.”

Mt. Assiniboine is another few hundred miles of thru hiking along the Canadian Great Divide Trail, and trekking out to that mountain means more to Robert than just ending his journey at the Canadian border.

“I can’t wait to get there and see it again. Even in the crappy times, that’s what I think about is getting back there.”

“There is a neat little waterfall that comes off one of the adjacent mountains into a pool and there are always these little trout in the pool and I can always catch them. So that’s where I’m going, to catch those little trout.”

Prawn fishermen in northern Queensland say they don’t know how their industry is going to survive.

Despite promising conditions like early rains, catches around Mackay have been less than half of what’s expected in an average year.

Danny Pope has been a fishermen for 44 years.

He has caught less than half the banana prawns he’d usually catch this time of year.

Danny Pope says they only get paid $5 per kilo for the produce they are currently catching and it’s getting pointless to keep operating.

“We are finding that the quality of the prawn is a smaller count prawn rather than then bigger count prawn, so we would expect normally to be catching half and half. But at the moment it’s basically 99 per cent in the smaller grades.”

He thinks prices in supermarkets haven’t decreased and somebody in the chain is taking too much without paying fishermen their share.

“The industry is at a point where if the price doesn’t firm up, there will be no industry. We cannot keep going on the prices we are getting.”

Part of the problem, he feels, is a lack of competition among marketers.

“Since the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority restructure within the green zones, and buy outs, taking out not only boats but marketers, we have less competition.”

Mackay wholesaler and exporter David Caracciolo agrees the industry is struggling to survive, but doesn’t think that prawn fishers earn less because middlemen take too much.

He says the problem is the high dollar, increasing operation costs, cheap imports, and an ageing work force.

“I personally don’t think the fishing industry is going to survive unless something happens very soon.”

The Chairman of the Seafood Importers Association of Australasia Norman Grant says it’s true that the industry is doing it tough, but says imports are definitely not to blame.

“Prawn imports have declined substantially since 2007. They are down 30 or 40 per cent since 2007, so there is certainly no increase in prawn imports.”

He says the global price for prawns has decreased due to prawn farming around the world.

And he says people aren’t willing to pay high prices for seafood anymore.

Story on ABC website: https://www.abc.net.au/news/rural/2011-04-07/tough-times-for-prawn-fishermen/6187468

Longer audio version on ABC Rural: https://www.abc.net.au/news/2011-04-07/fishermen-and-wholesalers-have-a-tough-time-making/6187486