The Blue Mountains are Hurting – We Spoke With LostMtns & Caro Ryan About What We Do Now

On a hot day this summer, a canyon in the Blue Mountains reportedly saw more than 300 people pass through its narrow walls.

Three hundred.

If you’ve ever stood in that canyon, felt the brace of cold water, watched the light move across the sandstone, you’ll know it doesn’t feel built for 300 people. It feels like a secret world. And yet, it’s no longer a secret.

It’s one of a growing number of locations in the Blue Mountains attracting more visitors than nature, or land managers, ever intended. And the impact to the environment is real: litter, graffiti, braided trails. But so are the safety risks. As people take on more trail than they can chew, there’s a rise in rescues, incidents, and trail closures.

If you’re from the Blueys or live there like me, you’ve had the conversations about this. They happen at trailheads, in pub beer gardens, and in Facebook groups at midnight. They’re tired conversations, tinged with a grief that’s now turned to anger, from people who love this place and are watching it change in real time.

Like anything else in this world, that anger needs somewhere to land. And it often lands in the laps of influencers and content creators, who locals say are making money off fragile locations, no matter what the cost to the environment or people’s safety.

But is it as simple as that? Where’s the line between inspiration and irresponsibility? Between sharing and oversharing? Between opening up the outdoors and loving it to death?

I Asked LostMtns What They Think

One of the platforms getting most of the anger (alongside Walk My World who didn’t respond to my interview request) is @bluemtns_explore x @LostMtns, who have a range of guidebooks and social accounts. There’s so much anger, there’s even a taking-the-piss Instagram account called @LostCnts.

But George Kaplan says their team won’t share a location unless it’s already publicly documented online.

‘We have no interest in being the first to expose a pristine or little-known location to a large audience’, George says.

‘However, if a site is already widely shared across established blogs, YouTube channels, or multiple social media platforms, we consider it part of the public domain conversation. In those cases, we may choose to include it, often with added context around safety, access, and environmental responsibility’, George tells me.

They also say they’ve pulled locations from their books that were fully photographed, mapped, and ready to go because they’ve felt access has deteriorated or safety risks have increased.

I asked outright what they thought LostMtns’ responsibility was for damage caused by people following their content.

‘Our responsibility is to educate, contextualise, and promote safe, environmentally respectful behaviour’, George tells me. ‘If someone enters a national park and litters, spray-paints arrows onto sandstone, ignores track closures, or brings prohibited animals into protected areas, that’s not a content-creation failure. That’s an individual making a conscious decision to behave irresponsibly.’

LostMtns absorbs most of the heat here in the Blue Mountains because, well, to put it mildly, they’re very good at what they do. And while there are dozens of accounts pushing locations across Instagram and TikTok with little thought and care, the difference is reach and influence. With increased reach comes more responsibility.

But George believes there’s a growing tendency in Australia to shift accountability away from the person doing the damage and onto whoever shared a photo online or wrote about it in a guidebook.

I agree with George that content creators aren’t responsible for the behaviour of individuals. For as much as I’ve disliked some of their posts, I’ve never seen one asking their followers to take a shit on the side of a trail. But I do believe there’s a responsibility for the collective impact of their influence.

Read more: How To Poo in The Bush

I was also pointed to the content in their guidebooks, which include pages dedicated to Leave No Trace and safety considerations.

Before I Go Any Further, a Confession

I have used Walk My World’s trail guides. And I own the LostMtns guidebooks. I used to have them on my coffee table, but now, as I’ve learnt more about their impact, they’re hidden away from my own guilty conscience and the judgy looks of friends.

So I know what George is saying is true. The safety content is there. But that’s just the books. Books that sit looking pretty on the coffee table, with a QR code that takes people straight to the trail, skipping over the safety content entirely if they’ve decided it’s not for them.

Which seemingly too often, people do.

Caro Ryan is a Blue Mountains local, outdoor advocate, and Deputy Unit Commander for the SES Bush Search and Rescue Unit. She recently received the Medal of the Order of Australia for her work educating people about safe and respectful outdoor exploration.

She calls it the ‘swipe-see-go culture’, and for me, it’s the reason why a disconnect between the books and social media (or blogs and social media for other creators – it’s not just LostMtns) is so problematic.

Read more: What’s Minimal Impact Bushwalking & How Do I Make Sure I’m Doing It?

Because what good is safety and Leave No Trace content buried in printed or online pages, when social media shows us posts with the ‘money shot’ instead of the reality of the trail? Posts that glamourise cliff jumps and death dives where the injury disclaimer is buried so far below the fold, most people never see it.

And the post that made me hide my books in the first place: ‘The best place to be on a 40°C day’ pointing to a tiny pool at the end of hours of exposed walking with no shade, no water, and no mercy.

Read more: How To Hike in Hot Weather

On a 40°C day, the best place to be is Blackheath swimming pool. Or honestly, just at home with a book. Maybe reading all those safety pages.

To their credit though, George was candid about the gap between print and social.

‘Sadly posts that go viral are not generally educational reels or posts. That’s a problem we face regularly when trying to navigate the algorithms that control socials’, he says.

He points out that their most recent reel focused on trail rubbish and Leave No Trace did get solid traction, which shows it can work. Which has to be good news, right? And it’s also really good to hear that there are actions being taken to educate their audience, even online. I really hope we see more of this.

Read more: Remember to Leave No Trace

What’s actually being damaged?

Another bit of good news is that canyons themselves, which is the ecosystem so often glamourised by content creators, may be more resilient than we give them credit for. Roger Lembit from Gingra Ecological Surveys offers a reframe worth hearing.

‘Canyons are not fragile landscapes’, he tells me. ‘During intense rainfall events, water charges through them, shifting and shaping them.’

But before you screenshot that, let him finish. The damage is happening on the access routes, in the swamps, on the braided tracks that so often don’t appear in anyone’s reel.

Multiply that by hundreds of visitors a day and you have erosion channels cutting through vegetation that took decades to establish. The canyon looks pristine in the photo. The bush 500m back is being quietly destroyed.

And then of course, there’s the deliberate damage: the spray-painted arrows, the graffiti on sandstone walls, the shits on the side of trails. bluemtns_explore x LostMtns’s George Kaplan is right: no-one is making people do this. But more awareness of these places without the right education means more people and more chances of things going wrong.

Lincoln’s Rock at Wentworth Falls was closed in January 2026 after visitor numbers reached up to 3,000 a day following a viral post from a member of the K-pop band, Blackpink. The sandstone where Jennie Kim sat now has an actual crater worn into it from people recreating the photo. Ancient groove markings made by Gundungurra people have been vandalised, with visitors re-grooving them or carving their own names.

The area had already recorded at least two serious injuries before the council closed it, with Mayor Mark Greenhill stating publicly that he wasn’t prepared to wait for someone to be killed.

‘The growth has been so fast and so alarming that it has meant our infrastructure on the site can’t keep pace with the numbers that are coming there’, he said in an interview with Time Out.

Lincoln’s Rock is council-managed but this spike in foot traffic is most evident in national parks, which are managed by state governments. A spokesperson for NSW National Parks and Wildlife Service told me that social media has increased demand for ‘off the beaten track’ locations.

Read more: How To Hike Off-Track

When I asked about NPWS’s engagement with content creators and strategies for managing viral locations, I was told they ‘monitor rapid changes in visitation to sites subject to increased visitation, to help inform management decisions’.

I was disappointed to not be provided a deeper insight into any potential strategies that NPWS uses to minimise these impacts. But I have seen signage and trackworks happen in various locations that have grown in popularity, though they’re often added long after the cat is out of the bag (and the spray-painted arrows are in place).

We Need to Stop Scolding

You’d need be living under a rock (or a carefully curated and unnecessary cairn) to not have noticed the correlation between influencers, damage to the outdoors, and the rise in the number of people underestimating the terrain, coming unprepared, or doing risky things to get a photo.

I’ve seen this countless times myself: I’ve begged people not to jump over railings, assisted strangers safely up rock scrambles they weren’t prepared for, and even helped a woman and her small kids find the exit of a canyon she thought was 1km long (it was 6km).

It’s for all these reasons and more that I understand the anger towards those who share locations for profit. I often feel it too.

But clearly the visceral anger that has driven these conversations to date, isn’t working.

‘Scolding doesn’t work’, says Caro, who has had a front-row seat to the damage and the rescues through her advocacy work and with Bush Search and Rescue.

‘Leave No Trace has been saying it since the 1960s. If we want a different outcome, we’re going to have to change what we do’, Caro tells me.

What that change looks like might make some people uncomfortable. Caro wants to see the outdoor community humble enough to learn from the very accounts it has spent years being furious at and ask what they understand about reaching new audiences that the rest of us have consistently failed to do.

‘It doesn’t matter whether we come in in thongs and a crop top and no water, or we come in with a crusty bushwalker hat. We’ve come from different places but we belong to this Country, we belong to this land. If you know better, you do better. So rather than scolding, why not think about more creative ways to reach and communicate and stop saying you have to do it just like us?’, Caro suggests.

Because – and I agree with this – the same power that has driven 300 people into a canyon on a hot day could, if pointed differently, drive real change.

Is there any way to share ethically?

After reckoning with his own impact, Aussie travel influencer Jackson Groves launched a social campaign called Adventure Bag project. The idea was simple: collect one bag of rubbish on every adventure, share it, tag it. Within a month, over 500 bags had been collected. He used the same viral mechanics, the tagging, the community, the sense of belonging to something, but pointed them somewhere useful.

Caro herself shares the region, not the spot. And I decided to stop writing about locations about five years ago and instead focus on interviews and deep-dive features.

But of course, I’m writing this on a platform that encourages people to get outside and explore new places. That’s not lost on me.

We Are Explorers Publisher Tim Ashelford knows the tension well.

‘When we first started out, we weren’t sharing much safety info in our articles – and we got nailed for it. But we recognised that we were in the wrong and changed our ways’, he says.

‘Consistently for the last several years, we’ve ensured that every article that walks step-by-step through a specific adventure includes links to our own Leave No Trace and safety articles relevant to that activity and location’, he says.

‘We also think carefully about whether we publish locations and often say no to pitches about places that are too dangerous, fragile, or simply illegal to access.’

‘We had talks and fundraising by folks from the Westpac Rescue Helicopter, as well as bush survival workshops with Alone Australia S2 contestant, Rick Petersen’, Tim says.

For me, this is the difference between building an audience and building a community. It’s not a perfect model. But it’s an intentional one. Because the only way to cause zero damage is to never go outside, never write about it, and never inspire anyone else to either. And that helps no one.

The Lost Apprenticeship

There’s a phrase that gets thrown around in the Blue Mountains: if you need AllTrails or spray-painted arrows to find your way, you shouldn’t be here. I don’t agree with that. Anyone is allowed outdoors. But the path to finding more remote and technical places used to be different.

When I arrived in Australia, I joined bushwalking clubs. I met people. Slowly, I built skills and was gradually trusted with locations that weren’t in any book. Nobody gatekept exactly but people wanted to know you were ready. The location came with the knowledge, the judgement, and the respect for place built in.

Social media has bypassed that entirely. Reels deliver the destination without the apprenticeship. That’s not a reason to keep people out. It’s a reason for every content creator, everywhere to think hard about how they deliver the context that the apprenticeship used to carry.

And for the rest of us? We need to stop being angry and start playing nice. Not because the anger isn’t deserved but because it isn’t working. If we judge people because of how they discovered a place, we lose any chance of them listening. But maybe, if we meet people with kindness, they might just surprise us.

The Disconnect Between Online & Offline

• Ditch Instagram’s Travel Expectations and Personalise Your Experiences
• What’s Causing the Increasing Number of Rescues in the Aussie Bush?
• The Effect Of Instagram On #Adventure
• What’s Minimal Impact Bushwalking & How Do I Make Sure I’m Doing It?