I’ve been on the trail for three hours, the first time I fall.

The coastal scrub has opened into rolling hillsides of summer-gold grass, the sea wind blustering the dry stalks. Climbing uphill has begun to take its toll, but it’s the downhill sections that bring me undone. Stepping onto dry, flattened grass, my boot shoots out and I land hard on my left side, knee cracking onto rock, shoulder wrenched sideways under the weight of my pack.

I lie there, gasping. When I try to sit up, the pack pins me to the ground. I’m a turtle flipped onto its shell. The path falls away on my right, so rolling onto my side only worsens the situation, the pack now pulling me downhill.

If I slip my arms from the straps, the pack will tumble to the dry creek bed below. Already tired and now sore, I don’t like my chances of retrieving it, hoisting it back on, and scrambling out of the ravine. Even if I manage not to lose the pack, I’m no longer confident I have the strength to deadlift it onto my back.

The only option is to keep my centre of gravity on the trail and haul myself upright with the pack still on.

I am 55, and until recently my body has been one of the most reliable instruments I’ve owned. It has carried me across Antarctic ice sheets, through half marathons, across the interminable demands of writing books and a PhD.

Since menopause in 2023, that reliability has quietly eroded. What this stage of life has brought feels less like a transformation than a displacement – the sense the person who did those things now belongs to a different body altogether.

I’ve always loved hiking – the sense of immersion, the intimacy of the connection between my feet and the land, the feeling of triumph at the end of a multi-day trek. Planning this solo trip, I told myself it was a way of reconnecting with that adventurous self, learning the contours of a changed body.

What I wanted, though I did not yet name it, was reassurance: that menopause had not marked the end of who I was.

Osteoarthritis and a knee replacement have meant that in the past few years, I’ve done more vicarious hiking than the boots-on-the-ground kind.

But in my reading of hiking memoirs, particularly by women, I began to notice a silence in the genre. Where were the voices of older women walking the trails in Australia? My mind started whirring. I’d write about my experience and begin to fill the gap.

My body had other ideas.

Becoming unrecognisable

The critical moment hit at the checkout in Officeworks, in early 2025. For the last few years, I’d been joking that I no longer recognised myself in the mirror. But on the day I held up the queue because my phone did not accept my face, I realised this was more than a menopausal woman having a bad day under unflattering lights.

Looking back, it would be easy to say it crept up on me. I went into the pandemic perimenopausal and came out the other side without a drop of oestrogen on board. My doctor prescribed patches, but my anxiety and depression escalated so dramatically that white-knuckling my way through the onslaught of symptoms with diet and exercise felt like the option most likely to keep me from suicide or heart attack.

Compared to friends, my physical symptoms weren’t especially extreme. The hot flushes were unpleasant, but I worked from home, so the odd drench of sweat in the supermarket wasn’t a catastrophe. And on the rare occasion I found myself madly fanning my face with term-deposit brochures while talking to a bank manager young enough to be my son, I was proud to treat it as a menopause consciousness-raising opportunity.

At first, the anxiety and brain fog were the worst of it. My memory was shot. I struggled to speak in full sentences and became convinced I was sliding toward early-onset dementia. My husband was certain that every time we spoke, I was also mentally conversing with someone else on an entirely different topic.

As the months passed, symptoms piled up. I hadn’t realised how much heavy lifting hormones were doing until they were gone. Insomnia, hair loss, sore joints, papery skin, weak nails. A metabolic rate so slow it felt as though all food was immediately packed away as fat, while my body fuelled itself on rage alone. Then my knee finally wore out and my eyes developed cataracts.

This body that had carried me through adventures across the world, this brain that had wrestled and reasoned me through a PhD thesis – none of it worked the same. In the past, whenever I doubted my ability or capacity, I could draw on those memories, knowing I had dragged myself over finish lines that demanded capability and endurance from both mind and body.

Those achievements had now lost their power. They belonged to a different body, a different person altogether. The person wearing the face my phone once recognised, not the face I’d begun to avoid in the mirror.

Why had I insisted on doing this solo? That morning, I’d hugged goodbye to my husband – my usual hiking partner.

Now, lying on the ground, staring up at the stretch of unblemished blue, I remember the pattern we fell into on Tasmania’s Overland Track: helping each other into our packs after breaks, adjusting straps, fishing water bottles from impossible-to-reach side pockets. With strength born of sheer desperation, I haul myself onto my knees, then feet. The pack skews my centre of gravity so completely, I feel as if I’m inhabiting a stranger’s body.

When I set out that morning it was, by any measure, a perfect day for a hike. The temperature in the low twenties, the sky stretched clear and blue from the hills of South Australia’s Fleurieu Peninsula on my left to the hump of Kangaroo Island on my right.

It’s January – not my preferred month for a local trek – but the forecast promised a rare stretch of mild weather, and I’ve spent six months trying to clear five days in my calendar for the Wild South Coast Way.

It was now, or another season-long delay. I’d already booked and cancelled the hike twice. The first time, I came down with COVID. The second cancellation was made in fear of being caught on the trail during a forecast once-in-a-century storm.

Alongside the........

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