Walking Lightly as a Commercial Operator
How The Adventure Gene teaches low-impact travel by practising it on guided trips.
Every TAG trip is designed to do more than get people from one campsite to the next.
The Adventure Gene exists to enable human-powered adventures, but our bigger goal is to help people become more capable, more thoughtful and more confident in the outdoors.
A good guided trip should stay with someone long after they get home. It should change how they pack, where they camp, how they move off track, what they do with waste, how they treat huts and heritage places, and how they explain those choices to the next person who asks.
That is the ripple effect we care about.
Our guides lead by example because the outdoors is the best classroom we have. We want guests to understand not only what low-impact travel looks like, but why it matters and how to do it themselves. If someone leaves a TAG trip better equipped to plan their own adventure, make good decisions and pass that knowledge on to a friend, that’s a win for us.
Access and responsibility belong together
Remote places are fragile. The more people who visit them, the greater the cumulative impact, and that impact is directly shaped by how well those people understand the environment they’re moving through.
TAG works with a lot of first-time and early-stage hikers. Many are visiting sensitive places for the first time. That makes education not just a nice addition to a trip, but a core responsibility. If we’re going to open these places up to more people, we have an obligation to make sure those people know how to move through them well.
Lead by example
The most effective way to teach low-impact behaviour is to model it. Our guides don’t just brief guests on what to do, they demonstrate it throughout the trip, in real situations, as they arise. TAG’s co-founders are trained Leave No Trace Master Educators, and that approach is built into how every trip is guided.
By having small groups of up to 10 people with 2 guides, this means that we can we can make sure every guest sees these decisions being made, understands why, and can ask questions as they happen.
Good systems make better choices easier
We try to design trips so the lower-impact option is the easy option.
Food and logistics
Because TAG manages food centrally, we plan portions carefully, keep packaging to a minimum and reusing unopened guest food where possible. We also provide return transport for all trips and offer a city shuttle to gear checks to reduce unnecessary car movements.
Gear
New hikers often buy unsuitable gear before they know what works for them. This can lead to gear that is used once, then replaced or discarded. Our gear model lets guests try high-quality lightweight equipment in real conditions before committing to buying anything.
Paint & Hike
An extra layer of thought goes into our creative trips. Guests use gouache rather than plastic-based paint, water use is kept low, and all used paint water is carried out by guides.
Respect for place
Our trips take place on Country and through landscapes with natural, cultural and historic significance. TAG does not present itself as speaking for Traditional Owners. Our role is to encourage respect, follow park directions, avoid disturbance to cultural or historic features, and direct guests toward appropriate sources of information where relevant.
The more people understand a place, the more likely they are to treat it carefully.
Active Stewardship
We want TAG to be useful to the places we visit, not just dependent on them.
TAG guides spend substantial time in the field. That regular presence means they can notice and report things that are useful to Parks staff. This includes facility issues, wildlife sightings, hut-repair needs, water availability, track conditions and other on-ground changes that need attention.
As a company, we’re also working towards becoming a long-term stakeholder in the historic Tabletop to Brooks Hut route along Arsenic Ridge. In April 2026, TAG assisted NSW Parks with trail clearing for the route’s reopening, helping return it to public use.
We see this as a natural part of operating responsibly on public land.
A note to finish
We do not claim to have a perfect model. We are always refining how we operate and looking for ways to do better.
What we do believe is that access to the outdoors comes with responsibility. A big part of what we do is passing on that respect to the people who hike with us, so they carry it into every trip afterwards.
