Speaker 2: 0:00

we started at Junction Burn Hut, and we went through to Robin Saddle Hut. And then through the merch, some mountains, and joined back onto the Kepper track. And it was 13 days worth. It's actually the first time that I've ever run out food on a trip

Speaker: 0:25

Kiro and welcome to the Tramping Life, a podcast about hiking in outro New Zealand, or as we call it here, tramping. I'm jt, and in each episode I chat with people who share passion for exploring this incredible country. We'll hear about the tracks they love, the huts they return to, the lessons they've learned, and what keeps them heading back into the bush. my guest today is Megan Dimo Antos, president of the Federated Mountain Clubs FMC. Megan is a passionate advocate for the back country and works to ensure that our huts, tracks and wild places remain accessible whilst championing conservation and responsible recreation. I'm delighted to welcome her to the podcast. Kira,

Speaker 2: 1:04

That was a very nice intro. Thank you.

Speaker: 1:06

My pleasure. You do very good work. So it's always good to promote the good work of FMC. I've been a long time member and I'm sure we'll come onto that later in the discussion, but I think it's good to always start at the start. Can you give us a bit of background about some of your earliest memories of being outdoors?

Speaker 2: 1:22

I didn't get into it early. It wasn't something that we did, as a family or anything like that. I grew up in Australia, as you can probably hear. I've been here for 25 years now, so this is home now. We used to go and do bush walks as part of our holidays. but it wasn't really until I was in my late teens, that I started rock climbing. and that was where things all started for me. So my introduction to the outdoors was rock climbing. And that was also my first taste of advocacy. I advocated for, our school to start doing our PE sessions at the new climbing gym that opened up in town. so that was my first foray into the outdoors. And through that I met people who did, caving and what we call in Australia hiking and bush walking and canyoning and climbing. And then I started climbing outdoors. and that was where it all grew for me. and then some of those people I started doing adventure racing with. so that was where I got hooked on. It was actually in my late teens.

Speaker: 2:26

So do you remember your first, bushwalk or tramp, I guess both in Australia and then your first experience, I guess tramping in New Zealand?

Speaker 2: 2:33

There's probably two that come to mind in Australia. One of them was, when I was camping at Wami, out in the Blue Mountains and I got charged by Wombat when I got up to go the toilet in the middle of the night. Must have been very traumatic because that's one of the first memories I always come back to when I'm camping. And the other one is, a canyoning trip that I did. Where it was in Australia and we were working our way down this canyon, we slid down a rock that we couldn't get back up and there was a brown snake sitting right in front of me. So for some reason, those are the two things that I think of. First when I think about my early outdoor adventures in Australia. When I moved to New Zealand, I was originally based in Auckland. I spent quite a bit of time around mortal W Beach, and around the Wakas and that was my first experience of as a New Zealand bush, which is actually not that representative At the time I moved to New Zealand, I was racing mountain bikes. I was racing 24 hour solo races and that was my thing For those first probably 10 years I was in New Zealand, I spent most of my time riding around in circles on mountain bike tracks, and not necessarily visiting, New Zealand all that much to be honest. I spent a bit of time overseas racing. I think it was 2012 I came. Third in the world in 24 hour solo mountain biking. So yeah, that's a part of my past that doesn't entirely reconcile with what I do now. And then when I stopped doing racing, fell outta love with it. And as a lot of people do when they've been doing something fairly serious, you know, little bit of an identity crisis. I've always been the crazy girl that rides her bike for 24 hours straight. Who am I now? what do I do now? What do I do with all this time that I used to spend training? I ended up joining Land Search and Rescue as a volunteer. and through that I started spending a lot more time. out in the bush, met some amazing people. the people at Lanza are like, a family to me and especially the groups I joined in rot. so that's where I live now so probably my first real foray into the New Zealand bush was actually fairly recently, probably about 15 years ago. mostly because I was out there looking for people who were lost. and then from that, once again, I met other people who were into walking up mountains in the snow, met other people who were into going in and visiting huts and and just developed, that love for it from there. but also because I'd spent all this time training and getting quite fit, I was also, quite lucky in that I had this really good base fitness, it meant that I could go out into the bush and I could do really long days and I could go quite fast and I could carry really heavy packs. And all of that stuff opened up a whole new world to me beyond just going and doing day trips or going and doing overnighters that's how I gotta to where I am now.

Speaker: 5:45

So what are some of the long, big trips that you've done?

Speaker 2: 5:48

I've done quite chunky I guess I'd call them expeditions, getting into the 10 to 15 day trips. and once you're looking at those sorts of trips, I'm very big on being self-sufficient and doing it under my own power. So I don't like using helicopters. I love being able to do point to point loops, that make logistics really easy. probably the most memorable one was when I did, A fully human power glue of the, um, Al Auto River, in Hawkes Bay. I'd been pack grafting for maybe a year at that point. and I parked up at the Una takeout on the al and, I've gotten permission to go through someone's farm. I walked up through the farm, up the lower al to, the AU stream, which is in the, northern ine, and up over into shoots hut. and then pretty much walked all the way through the entire car work at Forest Park and into the Kawa Forest Park to Boyd Hu. where I met some friends who had actually flown in. And we pack grafted the entire length of the back to where I'd started in Fauna Fauna. And I think that one was 11 days in total. That was a very cool trip. It's just so nice to have that sense of being able to look after yourself for such a long period of time in the bush. Like for most of it I was by myself. there were quite a few things that even now I look at and go, wow, that was quite a learning experience for me. The nado was quite high when I went in there, so I was having to, swim the river crossings when I was walking up the lower river. And then when I got onto the tops in the car worker it was flowing a bit of a gale and it was snowing. That was quite a neat trip. A couple of years ago I did a trip through the mech and mountains in Fand. and that's probably, when someone says, what's the most hardcore trip you've done? I'd probably say that we started at Junction Burn Hut, and we went through to Robin Saddle Hut. And then through the merch, some mountains, and joined back onto the Kepper track. And it was 13 days worth. It's actually the first time that I've ever run out food on a trip We'd planned on, JLG and weather being fuel and we planned on probably three days, in our tents. And we did have a couple of red level weather events go through while we were in there. But once we were off the tops, the terrain was so thick and gnarly, but we actually had to be moving every day that we were out there. It was just such slow going, it was nice when we could travel on the tops. But there were a couple of times that we had to dip down into the valleys and the burns because the weather just wasn't good for the tops. And once you got down into the valleys, it was really quite slow going. I'd pulled my food together on the assumption that, three days we probably wouldn't be moving. And I'd gone pretty tight with it, thinking I won't eat as much on those days, which is never true. So I got to about day six of that trip and I was looking at my food and I was like, I'm not gonna have enough food for the rest of this trip if I don't start rationing. So I was rationing for a week of that trip and, I don't think that there's anything that makes you hungrier than knowing that you don't have enough food with you. I actually ate my very last bit of food at lunchtime on the kepp track on the day that we went out. I think one of the things that you realize really quickly when you start doing long trips is that the thing that weighs the most is the food. I can have a five kilo base weight of my pack and my tent and all of the other stuff, but then for 13 days, you're carrying 13 kilos of food, and then if you put a pack graft on top of that, which is, another eight kilos, you can be carrying a pack that's nearly 30 kilos to start with. And I only weigh 51 kilos. Some of these trips, I start with half my own body weight on my back. There is always that temptation to go, to take out a bag of nuts or something like that, to try and lighten the load a bit. But yeah, I don't think I'll ever be, quite that stingy with my food, again after that experience.

Speaker: 10:12

Wow, that's a kind of venture. just thinking about the Hut network, are there any particular huts that your favorites are yours or any huts that you would, never go back to for various reasons?

Speaker 3: 10:22

I am very fond of the car

Speaker 2: 10:24

worker Forest Park. And the ones that always come to mind when I think of my favorites are a Ballard and, um, and Rocks Ahead. But then it would be remiss of me to not say that KTA Hut holds a very special place in my heart. KTA Hut or Come Hut used to sit at the end of Comet Road and the Southern car worker and it was getting vandalized and, shot up by Hunters and, doc was talking about removing it it's really unfortunate that. Road end huts now get such a hard time that we're getting to that point of losing them all. So we've got a really good relationship with Dock and Hall say, and they were like do you wanna move the hut? And we were like, yeah, sure. So we looked at a couple of different options, but being a pack crafter I'd spent quite a lot of time paddling between Kuri and Fauna and, the idea came up somehow to put the hu basically at that midway point there to effectively cater for, paddlers that were doing the overnight. It's quite a classic sort of grade three plus overnight trip, down the river there. So I pulled together a group of women and we did it as an as anini project. Whenever you do these things with large groups of volunteers, you never quite know how they're gonna work out. Like you're often pulling, a large group of people that dunno each other, that I dunno, in together and, putting them in the jar and shaking them up and letting them loose in the bush for 10 days together. And you never know how that's gonna go, right? You don't know if you're gonna get along or so. So anyway, I think probably most people would go, wow, you put 13 women in the bush together to work together for 10 days and you're gonna, you're gonna have some problems. And we didn't. It was just the most lovely. Supportive environment that I've ever worked in. Everyone who was on that trip left as friends. they all left with new skills. And so it was so cool. Like we, we moved this heart and that was great, but moving the heart and redoing the heart was nearly secondary to this little community that we'd that we'd created. And that hut holds quite a special place in my heart, predominantly because of the experience and the people that I met, as part of that project.

Speaker: 12:50

That's amazing. It's a very tangible thing you can do. And if you have a visit again in the future, there's a sense of accomplishment and then the memories from the experience of going through that together with that group, that's a fantastic thing to do.

Speaker 2: 13:01

You do get a bit of a feeling of I don't know if ownership is the right word, and there's probably Maori that, um, that describe it better. You do get this sense of ownership and of this being your place and this being a place that you've connected with, And that's quite special as well. And I think that probably when people go out and do projects, I think most people would probably come away with a little bit of that feeling that, it's a little bit of a corner turned a little bit of a life changing experience.

Speaker: 13:29

So what are your thoughts on that back country trust model where there's a lot more volunteer involvement rather than purely being managed by dock. I think that's a sustainable future for our HU network.

Speaker 2: 13:40

I think it is. and I think it's probably the only sustainable future for our Heart Network actually. And without getting too into the politics of it all, I've worked in volunteer organizations now for probably a decade and a half and, it never ceases to amaze me, just how much people are willing to give. especially for something they really love. When you say is that the best way to make it sustainable? And I say knowing a lot of the political background around it as well and how things like budgets work and political cycles and all that sort of thing. It's really probably the only way that we can do it. And I think that it's also quite essential that volunteer effort, sits external to Doc and managed externally to Doc. It's not as a criticism of Doc necessarily. but I think that people like to feel Like it's something that they've created and something special that they're a part of. And I don't think that any government department is the right way to manage and sustain and maintain that sort of coup or culture. That needs to remain pretty grassroots. That's one of the reasons that. We still try to be involved and, we try to make sure that we get out on a lot of projects in the field over summer as well, because actually connecting with people and forming those relationships is part of that volunteer sustainability piece and making sure that we have, a good succession plan within our volunteer workforce. Because in some ways working with volunteers is really different to working with people who are paid because their motivations are different and their availability's different and all of that sort of thing. But in a lot of ways at an organizational level, it's actually really simpler. you need to make sure that you've got, plans in place for succession planning for things like your team leaders and your chainsaw operators and your builders. And you need to make sure that you've got good engagement because people can walk away, if it just doesn't suit them anymore.

Speaker: 15:41

And I guess you're seeing similar things with FMC as a more of an advocate. I guess Back Country Trust is doing more and then FMC is more the advocacy part of a kind of trumping infrastructure.

Speaker 2: 15:51

Yeah, it's really interesting because at the moment I'm involved in, three volunteer organizations obviously. And my day job is with the backcountry trust. I'm the deputy chair of the Land Search and Rescue New Zealand Board, and I'm also the president of Federated Mountain Clubs. every organization, is at different stages of their journey. and there's sort of things that I can see happen in the more mature organizations like Land Search and Rescue that I can see now how this could play out in this other organization. It's nearly like being given the benefit of foresight, which is super nice actually. FMC is quite a different beast because, you are not, looking at that mass volunteer involvement the way that you are with the likes of search and rescue back country trust. you are looking at a smaller number of people to engage, but they're doing. Big, hefty chunks of highly skilled work. some of the submissions that we do, require a lot of knowledge around legislation and RMA and even the structuring of the submission and how politics works, it's all quite technical stuff. So keeping those people engaged and I think, probably for organizations like FMC the biggest thing that is constantly on my mind is how do we not burn these people out? We've got these people who are giving us their time for free. And how do we make sure that they don't just feel like they're being taken for granted because we're asking quite a lot of them. And so the challenges that, the FMC faces are probably a little bit different to the ones that we see in Play Society, that Country Trust and Lancer

Speaker: 17:29

i'm interested particularly in FMC. So the backbone of that has been the Tramping Clubs. That's what the organization was developed for, was the umbrella, voice for the Tramping clubs. And obviously over time that has changed and I'm interested in what do you think the future is our tramping clubs?

Speaker 2: 17:43

Yeah. That's a really interesting question because I think there's a lot of tramping clubs that would probably say, our membership's getting a bit older. there's not as many young people joining tramping clubs now. There's a lot of people joining Facebook groups and getting their information from social media and Facebook groups. that's a. Change in dynamic that, when I started learning stuff in the bush, I did what I refer to as the apprenticeship of the outdoors. I had people who have been doing it a while, who I effectively hung out with, and they mentored me, even though I wouldn't have called it a mentoring relationship. that's effectively what happened. And that's the role that clubs play, is that mentoring relationship and that, finding friends type stuff. but because the internet exists now, and it's really changed the way that we all interact and the way that we meet people and the way that we learn stuff. And in some ways that's really great. But in some ways I think that we lose a lot of the practical skill of passing on that knowledge, we lose, a lot of the connections that come with having learned from someone else. and it also means that there's probably a lot of people out there that don't even know who FMC is or what we do. traditionally our clubs have known that and they've continued to support us. So the clubs will always be the backbone of FMC. but, obviously we've also got, individual memberships. FMC needs money to be able to do the work that it does every organization does, right? Like that country trust needs money, Landstar needs money. people are doing this stuff for free. But you need money to be able to, travel around for advocacy and to meet ministers and to fly building materials to huts. And where a lot of FMCs money comes from is from memberships. And so as our member clubs get smaller, because of this change with technology and social media, obviously. The money that we gain from those clubs gets less. What I hope and what we aim for is that, people will start to understand the value in the advocacy work that FMC does if they're not part of a club, join up as an individual member so that they're still supporting that work. and I think it's 48 bucks a year, which, to me seems a bit of a no-brainer when you're looking the advocacy work that we're doing, the submissions and the work that we're doing at a high level with Doc to make sure that our, track network, in the back country, lives for another generation. Guess the moral of the story is, if you're not a member of a club and not currently a member of FMC, please join as an individual supporter so that we can keep doing the work that we're doing.

Speaker: 20:26

That's what I've been doing for, I guess probably 15 years, is through the independent supporter route. And I think the risk is you, it's easy to take things for granted, particularly if you're only maybe doing a few traps a year. And maybe it's, the Great Walks or some of the busier tracks, it's less obvious the value around the wilderness and the back country.'cause you may not be personally experiencing it. I'm interested in your views on social media and how you think that has changed the tramping experience.

Speaker 2: 20:50

I think a lot of people these days can ask questions of people they dunno, without those people knowing them or their skillset, and can go and buy things, to do some quite dangerous stuff without having ever actually, interacted with someone who's done the activity before. That really worries me. I think a lot of people get away with it. And I think I see this in actually the pack grafting community quite a lot. But we're also seeing that, people who will go and buy some crampons in an ice ax and go for a walk up in avalanche terrain when they've not done any training or mentoring in that space. You see a lot of people who buy the gear they've not done it before. And they go out and start doing it and they have a fun time and they get away with it. And most people will get away with it, until they don't. It's really easy as someone who's gone through that whole apprenticeship the outdoors to be sitting there going, oh, there's someone wrong on the internet, I must correct them. But also that's kind of part of the whole learning experience now is that, people are going out there and they're having to figure it out a bit themselves. That's the downfall of it is people aren't necessarily gain reliable information from reliable sources. and they're not necessarily getting those really clear inputs and reality checks that they get if they learning things, person on person. but then the flip side of that as well is that, that's the best way for us to communicate with those people as well. If I was being really critical of how we've done things and I think here about FMC in particular, It's our responsibility as leaders within our community to find a way to connect with those people, to make sure that they can go and do things, safely and learn the skills that they need. And so social media is the avenue for us to do that. I'll be honest and say I don't think we've gotten that entirely correct, to date, but it's something that we're actively working on.

Speaker: 22:52

The elephant in the room is climate change, which is obviously existential to everything, but specifically around tramping. It's hard to see how with all the extreme weathered events and the damage to the infrastructure, it's gonna be a different world for tramping in the future.

Speaker 2: 23:08

For sure. I've seen it even in my time in the Hills and in New Zealand as well. And interestingly, the reason that I actually started pack grafting, and I think that was six or seven years ago now, is because I realized that there were places that I wasn't going to be able to access anymore, because of glacial melt and that sort of thing. So I was looking at this whole thing years ago A trip that springs to mind with regards to this is a couple of years ago we did, I did a trip with a mate, from Liverpool Hut, up and over into the snowball glacier, in the, uh, wilderness area. It's quite, quite a remote area. and the glacial wastage in there. There's, it's quite remarkable. Everything took longer than we planned on it taking and even stuff like Moyer's Guide had said that, oh, on a good year, you'll be able to walk up the Glaser to mystery hole. And there's just no way, like now at Mystery Coal, there's a 500 meter precipice that goes straight down into the the glacier below it. so you have to go up and around the outside of it, and it takes things in there, take days longer than they would have taken even five or 10 years ago. I remember Hugh Van Norden sending me a photo taken in exactly the same place as one of my photos. And it was quite remarkable. His was taken nearly 30 years to the day before mine. And, they didn't look like the same place. it was really quite sad. And I remember, when we got up to Mystery Coal sitting there looking at this thing, and you going, this is really beautiful in its own way. But I remember saying to my mate, we're literally sitting here looking at how humankind is decimated the planet. This is a really stark reminder of the damage that we've caused. And on that trip, we, even though we were up in the high alpine environment we didn't have a freeze the entire time. We were in there for 10 days. We planned for 13, and we hadn't had a freeze, and the snow pack was collapsing under our feet as we were going across the glacier. We ended up having to, get heli lifted out of there because the only way that we could go, was up over the shoulder of I think it was Mount Lydia. And it was just this, steep shoulder, about 400 meters high with bluffs at the bottom, and you could see all the sloughing and the indications of avalanche prone terrain across it. And we're sitting there going we could give it a crack. We're probably gonna get hosed. We couldn't go back the way that we come because the terrain was such that, we'd done some pretty sketchy scrambling. And that's another thing that you get when you've got, glacial wastage. The stuff that's left behind. it's not nice to clam. And you can't, you don't really have anything that you can fix ropes or protection to. And so we couldn't come back the way we come. We were running out of food and we potentially could have gotten down into 10 hour gorge and come out, but that would've taken probably. Six or seven days. And we didn't have enough food for that. So we ended up having to set off our PLB and get lifted out. And I think that we're probably going to see a lot more of that kind of stuff where travel becomes more dangerous where in some cases travel just becomes not feasible anymore. And becomes far more difficult and requires far more skills. We're already seeing that. And I've even in my short lifetime in the hills, watched it happen before my eyes.

Speaker: 26:52

Yeah, it's quite terrifying. Even just going down to the West coast and seeing the glaciers. I saw'em 10 years apart and, you go back 10 years alone and you can't see them So it comes to life when you can see it with your own eyes

Speaker 2: 27:01

We keep building hydro on these tiny rivers that are glacial fed, tiny compared to some of the rivers that we have hydro on. And it's these rivers aren't going to be reliable in years to come. You wonder if people are just looking at what's right in front of them and going, actually that's not gonna, that's not gonna worry me in my lifetime. But we can't look at things like that.

Speaker: 27:24

Agreed. do you have a kind of bucket list of trips that you've got planned you'd like to do in the near future?

Speaker 2: 27:31

So it's interesting since COVID, I actually haven't had a desire to go overseas again, which is weird. There's lots of cool stuff to do overseas, but there is so much cool stuff to do in New Zealand. We've just got so many places we can adventure and explore here. So me and a couple of mates went into the lands, over Easter and we got all the way up to Zora Canyon and all we wanted to do was keep going further up the catchment. We just wanted to explore more. Luke Sergeant, who makes some Southern light packs and myself have decided that we want to, do a trip, that starts further up. The catchment come in from one of the, neighboring catchments, And come over the top, into the top of the catchment and work our way fully down and just see how much of it is paddle. so that's one trip that I'm quite keen to do. another one is to head up to the Garden of Eden and the Garden of Allah, to do them as a, pack craft skiing type trip. So combine, the skiing with the pack crafting. it's quite a lot of gear to carry, so it probably needs, a bit more thought. But lucky for me is that because I'm only, 1.5 meters tall, my skis will fit inside my pack craft. I'm not sure that I could say the same for my mates, so they might not be as quite as keen on it as I'm, but they're probably two of the things I'm really keen to do. And I've also I've actually just taught myself. A little place down in Moria in between Murchison and Reef and on the west coast of the South island and it overlooks the Victoria Forest Park and I've already been mapping out some trips to doing there. It's pretty rugged and so I'll probably spend the next couple years doing quite a bit of exploring around the Victoria Forest Park area as well

Speaker 3: 29:13

and some excellent hot springs when you finish.

Speaker: 29:17

Thank you so much for listening to the Tramping life. If you've enjoyed today's episode, please follow the podcast in whatever app you use. Tell a friend about it and consider leaving a rating or a review. It really helps more people discover the show. you have any questions or feedback, I'd love to hear from you. Drop me an email at the tramping life, one word@gmail.com.