Author: Sharron Came, President
With the year drawing to a close many of you will be putting the finishing touches to your holiday tramping plans. The summer trip schedule will be out soon and hopefully there are a few trips therein that pique your interest. Big thanks to Amanda and Richard for putting the schedule together and to everyone who committed to lead a trip. It bears repeating that without trip leaders we would cease to have a tramping club. If you want to help out with Bushcraft course in March 2012 get in touch with Amanda at
Of course we need members too, to go on the trips! Our annual new member night is coming up on Wednesday 22 February. This is the evening when we throw the doors open and welcome people new to Wellington, or tramping, or both and try to interest them in signing up for some trips with a view to eventually joining the club. If you have any friends, work colleagues or family that might be interested don’t forget to bring them along. If you are interested in promoting the night or helping out on the night let Megan know at
Shortly Helen will be sending you a message asking you to renew your membership and probably somewhere in this newsletter there is information about the revised membership criteria and membership types. Keeping our membership data base up to date, organising mail outs of newsletters and journals etc is pretty time consuming. Big thanks to Helen for quietly, patiently and methodically working through these tasks. Next year we are keen to find ways to further stream line membership stuff to reduce the work load of the Membership Officer, cut costs and reduce the amount of paper we create. If you have any ideas Helen would love to hear from you at
If you are looking for a summer bach (okay crib if you are from the Mainland) the Club Lodge is worth considering. The Lodge tends to be underutilised in summer despite the cheap rates, great weather and the huge variety of things you can do when based at Ruapehu. Contact Brian at . Anyone can use the lodge as long as one person in your party is a club member or you know a member who will vouch for you. Amelia White has been doing lots of work behind the scenes coming up with ideas on what you can do at the lodge. We hope to have that material available on the club website early in 2012. If you are interested in helping out with lodge related stuff we are keen to hear from you. We are looking for someone to take on the Committee role of Lodge Convenor and every year we like to train up a few more people in the running of the lodge to replenish our pool of lodge leaders available to run the lodge when we get group bookings. If you are interested please get in touch.
The year end is traditionally a time for thinking about what you want to achieve in the next 12 months and making resolutions. I’m really keen to get some more of the right kind of people involved in the administration of the club. For me, and the rest of the Committee I suspect, 2011 has been a bit of a slog. To be quite blunt, without more volunteers helping out with running the club and unless we figure out more efficient ways of operating to reduce workloads we will go the way of the Kakapo and then the Moa.
Upshot is I’m looking for a few more energetic, practical, efficient, innovative types who are good at getting things done to come onto the Committee. While much can be achieved from the sidelines we need a strong committee to drive administrative change and really build the club up and keep it going for future generations. There is a perception out there that being on the Committee involves abandoning your exciting fun filled life in favour of sitting round at boring meetings all evening debating the size of pin heads. Not on my watch.
I would like to thank the current Committee for pretending to read all my emails, all their hard work, support and good humour during the year, it is very much appreciated. To everyone who is part of the WTMC community, I wish you an awesome holiday and hope to see you down at the pub for a few Xmas drinks on either the 14th or the 21st of December, preferably both. Wherever you are over the holiday period, may your weather windows be big enough to accommodate your plans. I look forward to working with you in 2012 which I very much hope will not be the year of the Kakapo.