Author: Amanda Wells, Chief Guide
While Christmas is looming, today I am focused on the slightly closer deadline of the WTMC Summer trip schedule. Between now and you reading this newsletter, it will have been semi-miraculously filled and the wrestle with Microsoft Office won. I hope! Thanks to everyone who’s put their hand up to lead a trip, including a couple of newbie leaders. One highlight of the past handful of schedules has been doing away with ‘leader required’s nearly entirely. The flipside is that more trips have been cancelled so you sometimes feel like we’re in the doldrums. But when Steve Kohler, our statistics maestro, ran the latest numbers, this year is tracking just ahead of 2010 – which was a vast improvement on the nadir that was 2009. We’re still down on the peak of activity around 2005 but there is definitely no need for despair.
One way to prevent bad weather bleeding punters from your trip on a Thursday and Friday is to enforce our policies around payment. You’ll find that if people have parted with cold, hard cash, they are less likely to be put off by a little rain or wind. Don’t be afraid to require payment to confirm a place on the trip: 10 days before for a North Island trip, and 17 days before for a South Island trip. If you are a punter, please make leaders’ lives easier by paying before the deadline. And remember that the most interesting tramping experiences generally don’t involve perfect weather…
If you are leading a trip and need to cancel it, please do let me know. I can pass that on to the transport officer, emergency contacts coordinator and newsletter editor so they don’t hassle you.
I think it was last month that I wrote about gear and how frustrating it is to find problems with club gear when you’re out in the hills. If you are leading a trip and see a punter attaching a fly to the outside of their pack, please stop them. Flys are not bombproof and need to be packed away from pointy forms of harm. We all have an interest in taking good care of our expensive collective gear. Please help inculcate this culture into those new to the club.
We’re looking to run a Bushcraft course next year, probably 3-4 March and will be on the hunt for instructors. You don’t need to be an outdoor survival expert, just someone who can introduce others to the basics of tramping. Many people are keen to get out in the hills but don’t know a fly from a gaitor, and you might enjoy teaching them.
I haven’t headed off on any tramps since I wrote my last newsletter column, which feels very odd but will be remedied later today. Training for the Goat and planning a couple of summer epics has been keeping me busy. I hope you all have time to get out into the hills in the next couple of months and remember that special joy of longer trips. Not so joyful when you get weather like many of us experienced down south last Christmas, but still worth it!
Merry Christmas and happy tramping