Unless Il Padrone objects, Dan, please do split the thread "Wow! Whoa!...woe. Severe Sherpa shimmy under load".
Posts #53, 60, 61, and 62 from your thread can all go into "Non-Thorn Related" under the heading "Through the Centre of Australia". They're definitely "anything cycling" and a discussion worth having.
When you've split the thread, I suggest you remove your diplomatic #63 post discussing staying on topic, as off-topic in your thread. This thread which I've just started ("Thread-splitting requests") may be a good place to put it as a general statement of intention.
As a researcher, I'm sympathetic to your desire to keep topics pure, but as a user who's been on the internet since before it was called the internet (it was called the Arpanet) I also know your quest is doomed, and, considering that we now routinely search every word on the net, not just titles, unnecessary. On my own ROBUST group for intellectuals at
http://www.goodreads.com/group/show/46791 we don't even try to police the topics -- on the contrary, we explicitly have no rules, and manage extremely well by simple good manners.
I think, if you're going to take regulating topics seriously, that you want to see at least some off-topic wandering as permissible, the major chunk as an opportunity to enrich other subfora by moving them into other threads or as the seed corn of new threads, and only (on this forum anyway) a minority of off-topic wanderings as undesirable. The effect otherwise will be stultifying.
Thanks.
Andre Jute