Takayna Trail is a celebration of trail and ultra running with a purpose. An epic way to explore and save the beauty of Takayna!
The Takayna Trail Run is an annual event since 2019 and is strictly limited to the first 150 runners. The course traverses grass plains, amazing sands tracks along rugged wild coastlines and bush tracks.
The main goal of the Takayna Trail community is to use our love for running to help protect Takayna. We run to have Takayna protected as a World Heritage listed National Park, returned to Aboriginal ownership.
The Takayna region of north-western Tasmania is home to one of the last undisturbed tracks of Gondwanan rainforest in the world and one of the highest concentrations of Aboriginal cultural heritage sites in the southern hemisphere. Yet this place, which remains largely as it was when dinosaurs roamed the planet, is currently at the mercy of destructive extraction industries, including logging and mining.
‘Takayna / Tarkine remains today a rare gem of natural intactness in a world where the destruction of wild nature is rampant and accelerating. It should also be one of the easiest in the world to protect. Comprising just seven percent of Tasmania, the Tarkine contains the nation’s largest temperate rainforest, a galaxy of its rare and endangered wildlife and some of the richest Aboriginal heritage in the hemisphere. The latter has been inscribed on the list of National Heritage. The cleanest air in the world, as measured by the nearby UN monitoring station, blows across the Tarkine’s shores.’
Bob Brown
The Bob Brown Foundation is all about action with a vision to protect Australia’s wild and scenic natural places of ecological and global significance. The first place on their radar was the stunning Tarkine in a remote part of North West Tasmania.
They need your help for a logging halt in Tasmania’s wilderness tracts of old growth forests and the ancient rainforests of Takayna/Tarkine.
“After we revealed the clear-felling of old growth rainforest in Takayna/Tarkine last January 2018, the Tasmanian Government continues to ignore the climate emergency and extinction crisis that outdates these appalling practices in our environment,” Bob Brown Foundation Campaign Manager Jenny Weber said.
What if running could save a rainforest
Weaving together the conflicting narratives of activists, locals and Aboriginal communities, and told through the experiences of a trail running doctor and a relentless environmentalist, this documentary about running doctor, conservation photographer and environmentalist Nicole Anderson, presented by Patagonia Films, unpacks the complexities of modern conservation and challenges us to consider the importance of our last truly wild places.
Join one of the two running events of 70K or 26K and help save Takayna/Tarkine from logging, mining and off-road vehicle damage and to support the Bob Brown Foundation campaign to have Takayna/Tarkine protected as a World Heritage listed National Park, returned to Aboriginal ownership.
Takayna Ultra 70K
Starting beside the dark brown button grass tannin-stained Nelson Bay River, the run immerses you immediately in rolling native grass plains and stands of dry eucalypt forest. Open beaches, dunes, and impressive low rocky sections, and more dark rivers and creeks to cross, are dispersed occasionally with fishing shack settlements and extensive Aboriginal heritage. Traversing complex coastal country and a stand of remnant old growth forest adjacent to the Arthur River, this run takes you across wild Takayna; an experience you will never forget.
To qualify you must have completed any 50km ultramarathon (such as UTA 50) or longer than 50km (such as Bruny Island) and finished within race cutoff time in the last three years.
Takayna 26K
Starting at the Edge of the World, booming surf and wild currents at the mouth of the mighty Arthur River with the bowels of the Takayna forests strewn grey as driftwood, the coast is wild and ragged but somehow gentle and gracefully sculpted.
Along wide open beaches and old 4WD tracks up the rocky coast, kelp stinkbowls await and the shorebirds cajole. You will pass through one of the most extensive tracts of Aboriginal heritage there is, mostly unseen to the untrained eye. This run takes you across the wild Takayna / Tarkine to Nungu / West Point.
Sign up now for this bucket list, life & earth changing run in beautiful North West Tasmania.
Image by PixbayBlade
