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For tens of thousands of years humans have marvelled at Claustral Canyon in the Blue Mountains, today one of the toughest day walks on the continent.
Every year at least 2000 canyoners struggle for eight hours, swimming, abseiling down waterfalls, jumping into freezing deep pools and genuinely risking their lives.
Visitors are guaranteed to go beyond the limits of fear and to be nursing at least a minor injury on the heart-breaking hike back to the car park. In the past two decades three people have perished and countless others have had narrow escapes because of roiling flash floods, hypothermia or climbing accidents.
But what, asks Jack Wolfenden, lecturer in conservation management at the University of Western Sydney, is the impact of people on the canyon?
Over the past two years Mr Wolfenden has made more than 50 visits into Claustral's dim sandstone bottoms, sampling water quality and life in the 7.5-kilometre-long system.
He has studied the areas most heavily used by canyoners, as well as its rarely visited offshoots. Since the known first European descent in 1962, he estimates that at least 20,000 pairs of feet have made the journey through Claustral.
Ancient tool-making grooves are present in sandstone above the canyon, as are charcoal art sites indicating that humans have felt its power for millennia.
"People have probably been walking here for 50,000 years."
Organisms representing more than 70 genera were found in the canyon and, despite the obvious signs of disturbance by people along the main route, there appears to be no immediate impact on biodiversity from canyoning, Mr Wolfenden says.
His work took him and his students into Claustral even in the frigid winter, when visitors are required to swim long distances in water as cold as 5 degrees.
An achingly steep track leads in and out of the canyon, and it is desperately in need of erosion control: in places the topsoil has swept away down to bedrock.
While this may be ugly and off-putting to purists wanting a wilderness experience, it has little impact on the canyon's ecology, Mr Wolfenden says. Even down in the depths, any physical damage wrought by the canyoners is not ecologically serious.
This is because anything that lives in Claustral must be among the toughest and most resilient of creatures - able to cope with thunderous surges of water, freezing cold, low light and very little food.
Water pollution is one thing Claustral's creatures would be sensitive to. But, luckily, filth is not a significant part of canyoning. "A canyon is basically a big, wild, unpolluted sandstone stormwater drain," Mr Wolfenden says. "The animals that live there have to have their act together. ...You have got to be incredibly robust to live here. They're tough little suckers."
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