Emilie: 0:00

My 10-year-old birthday goal was to get to 300 huts. But then I wanted to get to 400 before I turned 11.

Speaker: 0:15

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.

Jonty: 0:36

My guest today are Victoria and Emily Bruce. they're best known for tramping the length of ERO on the TRO Trail, and they shared their story of courage, connection, and discovery. I'm delighted to welcome them both to the podcast Kiro.

Victoria: 0:50

Thanks for having us.

Jonty: 0:51

So I'd like to, start with your first memories of the outdoors.

Victoria: 0:56

My memories of the outdoors go back to my own childhood where I was born in New Zealand, but grew up in um, parts of Australia in Outback Queensland and also Tasmania. Where being homeschooled the bush was my backyard. The sounds of Kara won and mag pies and the thrilling of cicadas and building little huts and wigwams in the bush with my brother looking for frogs under logs by damp streams under ferns. Just enjoying the best parts of a childhood lived outdoors.

Emilie: 1:29

I have been tramping with my mom since I was four years old, and now I'm 11 and I've been to over 430 back country huts across New Zealand. And I always enjoy being outdoors, especially with my mom because we have heaps of fun and it's so nice to be surrounded by nature and the wildlife.

Jonty: 1:54

Do you remember the first multi-day tramp you

Speaker 4: 1:57

did together?

Victoria: 1:57

I think it was like after. Our third or fourth overnight trip, we said let's do a multi-day trip. Let's go to this place called Nelson Lakes National Park. And I think we had some sort of friends that were like, oh, you sure you wanna go there? What about the St James Walkway or something? I was like no, I've looked at this Nelson Lakes National Park and think we could go there. And we ended up going up to cap Huts where we set out a snowstorm, with these two lovely young, off-duty dock guys who, nipped out into the snow with their rifles and they said they were going up on the tops and we thought, what? Where are they going? Anyway, they came back and said it was a white out and spent the afternoon drawing pictures with Emily, and telling stories of their adventures.

Emilie: 2:45

I remember that trip. We made a snowman outside the next day when the sun came out.

Jonty: 2:50

That's a pretty good first trip. And then how much experience did you had before you embarked on Tierra?

Victoria: 2:56

Our first overnight tramp. Emily was four and a half. And by the time we embarked on te she was seven. So we had been to, I think, 50 of the dock cuts around the south island, and we'd had a couple of multi-day. Tramps under our belt. We'd done, I think it was maybe the St. James walkway was probably like the longest in terms of physical distance, but we'd also been into some, rougher country like RA and Kahu, Rangi, a little bit on the West coast. But definitely taro was the biggest undertaking in term of logistics and distance and just the physical. Requirements of, walking a 3000 kilometer trail,

Jonty: 3:42

it seems like you probably had more experience than many or certainly the ones who write books about it or talk about the ta.

Victoria: 3:48

I think Adventure was done during the COVID, border closure years. Which was great for us because we had really quiet trails I think, compared to, more recent years. It was interesting on 90 Mile Beach, people often try to cover that a hundred kilometer distance in four days and we straight away knew that wasn't gonna work for us. So we'd budgeted six days and picked out some campsites in advance and so on. When we got down to Ahi Potter at the end of it, there were two people who'd started and overtaken us and ended up with, broken feet and horrendous blisters and a, I think a fractured foot or something like that. For a lot of people, it's a definite physical, throwing an uncondition body into a demanding physical regime can definitely have consequences.

Jonty: 4:36

And

Speaker 4: 4:36

how,

Jonty: 4:36

Emily, did you cope with it physically?

Emilie: 4:39

I thought it was so much fun walking down 90 Mile Beach and across the length of New Zealand. It was especially fun when we pack lots of lollies and chocolate, and I knew there was gonna be a little hut to sleep and discover at the end of each day.

Victoria: 4:54

what about your body physically? Like how did you go because you were so much littler than all the other grownups, say your legs were littler.

Emilie: 5:02

Yeah, I had really little legs, so most people would try and do a distance quite a lot faster than I could I just took one step at a time and I made sure I enjoyed myself along the way and I didn't carry too much of course. And I made, sure I carried the chocolate and yeah, I guess I just did it one step at a time with my mom's help along the way.

Victoria: 5:25

It could be incredibly dextrous though. Like you come up to windfall and so on and you are there trying to clamber over it and little people can just slither on underneath. And the thing with children as well, is that they might not walk as fast but they have absolute amazing recovery. We stagger into the campground end of the day, throw the packs down. I'm there just wanting to lie on the grounds, have a cup of tea, and Emily's skipping around fairy gardens, mummy, let's play. So yeah, they might be a little, but their recovery is absolutely amazing. Enviable.

Jonty: 5:58

Did you have the book or books now in mind when you started,

Victoria: 6:02

it actually started with wanting to fundraise for charity, as part of the AU journey. So we set up a give a little account and one of the charities that we. Partnered with Federated Mountain Clubs were amazing and said, oh, hey, why don't we host your blog on our Wilder Life platform? So all you have to do is, send us a bit of a writeup every week or so and some photos and we'll just, work in the background and turn it into a lovely blog for you. And I thought, oh, that would be great. And as it turned out, as I started writing these for them, I realized. Actually, the words were just flowing out of me. And so it wasn't once a week, it was almost every day. This writing, this beautiful experiential walking through the ever changing, evolving New Zealand landscape, everything that we were seeing and experiencing and feeling. As well as the um, internal, emotional journey that I in particular was going through at that time. it really was the fundraiser and the want to do something for charity, which led to the creation of the sort of social media accounts and the posting on social media was to encourage people to donate to the fundraiser. Which was really effective. We raised over$20,000 for, federated Mountain Clubs and the Mental Health Foundation of New Zealand's. Before ROA finished, I was really fortunate to be approached by a publisher. A couple of publishers actually who said, Hey, we've followed your journey. We love the story, and have you ever considered writing a book? And I thought, oh, that would be cool. And then Emily was approached by, Potter and Burton, who saw her in FMCs Backcountry, magazine and said that they would love to, to share her story of a amazing inspirational little 7-year-old doing hard things and having a fabulous time in nature. Yeah, I think the fundraising for charity and the support of Federated Mountain Clubs really helped. Us give us some practical profile. And for some reason, maybe it was the lockdown. Times, or it really just seemed to capture people across the nation. We were really surprised that anyone would want to follow, some mad mom and her little kid going on a big walk in nature. But we just had, TV coverage and radio coverage and people following us from all around the world, not just New Zealand. There was something in that journey that really Resonated with people.

Jonty: 8:36

And how have you found the media

Speaker 4: 8:38

attention? it's, I guess there's probably pros and cons.

Victoria: 8:41

Media is fleeting and fickle, isn't it? I think it's probably just a bit of a flash in the ocean compared to everything that that goes on in a daily or weekly media cycle. But it has just been really lovely to think that being able to share our story has helped inspire, another generation of. Young T and young families just to get out there and really enjoy what's in our backyard.

Speaker 4: 9:05

What do the kids at school think?

Emilie: 9:07

I'm sure a lot of them think it's a really good idea and they want to get outdoors because getting outdoors is really important, especially starting from a young age because it is our natural ecosystem and we need to protect it. And it's very important to, just meet the nature and become friends with it and not to be scared of it because it can be seen pretty scary out of the big wide world. So it's really important to get outside for everyone.

Jonty: 9:33

Do any of your school friends tram?

Emilie: 9:35

Yeah, I've got lots of friends, well, a few friends who like tramping. Sometimes we go on trips together, but mostly I just go tramping with my mom.

Jonty: 9:44

You recently did quite

Speaker 4: 9:46

a epic adventure in Tasmania. Yeah, that was,

Victoria: 9:49

Last summer, we went and did a 24 day, traverse through the southwest national Park, which is, a wilderness area, in Tasmania's Southwest. I just wanted to really have an immersion. in the Tasmanian bush, and I wanted to link up, a few trails to make it into a longer circuit. This one ended up being, a 24 day mission, which was, um, yeah, a lot of fun.

Jonty: 10:15

I'm imagining quite thick a gnarly bush and quite a lot of mud.

Victoria: 10:19

Oh, amazingly so. I mean, absolutely. I mean, everything over there has evolved to protect itself from little soft browsing, marsupials. And so all the plants just pretty much have spikes of some sort lacerating spikes on them. Which we had read about, we definitely had read about them and so we brought, like our gardening gloves for hand protection and full arm and body protection. But still it, when I came back to New Zealand, it was just so lovely to even go through the sub alpine and be like, ah, oh Larry, you're not that bad, are you? And stroke tussic grass, because it's quite hard too in that with Tasmania not having. The highest of mountains is that you don't necessarily pop through that gnarly sub alpine layer onto those open tops that often. On the traverse of the southern ranges, we were just battling through this fabulous scrub called a sc. Which is just this massive, thick, almost hedge like stuff with little tiny needles.

Emilie: 11:23

It's like a spear grass on a tree, but like a whole bunch of tiny baby spear grasses on a tree everywhere.

Victoria: 11:30

And it rained a lot. So there's this magical kind of ecosystem there. it's a lot of wetness and they don't have huts, not even a little bivy, just to, crawl inside and dry out. That was probably quite hard. Just the continual wetness. continual lugging the tent, but, oh, the wildness. Of the area how wild and rugged and the lack of people and, the wildlife there is just larger than life really, is massive black cockatoos going from summiting, a mountain with just these ragged ridge lines running out all around you and then dropping onto the actual coastline, walking down beaches. it was a pretty fabulous trip,

Speaker 4: 12:18

wasn't it? Yeah, definitely was.

Jonty: 12:19

Does the TA feel like a distant memory now?

Victoria: 12:22

In a way, while. it was really hard for us at that point in time in our lives, with Emily being seven really, it feels like just the launching off point for a much more varied more challenging and more diverse tramping career, for want of a better word. the adventures that we've been on after roa I think would be far more fabulous material for future books.

Jonty: 12:47

And how do you decide which trips to do?

Victoria: 12:50

We look at the weather forecast a lot, and then we look at where. The weather might be nice. And then we think about the time we have, and how far it is to drive. But often a lot of our trips seem to be exploring new places. We've been getting into I guess the Hut bagging. Because it's a wonderful way of, following the existing Hutton Track network or abbreviating it so that you can, go off track between tracks, and explore new parts of the country. We always like to go somewhere new where possible. And it depends also on energy levels, if we're feeling a little bit less like wanting a thrashing, you know, over here on the west coast, all the mountains have started at sea level.

Emilie: 13:31

Yeah.

Victoria: 13:32

It can be a bit of a commitment if you just wanting a bit of a wander, maybe something on the um, Canterbury, Otago side, can often be a nice option.

Speaker 4: 13:40

That's a lot of huts.

Victoria: 13:42

Yeah. We were counting, I think it was about over a hundred when we finished out at hour. So that was still a very small amount. Emily what was your 10-year-old birthday goal.

Emilie: 13:50

My 10-year-old birthday goal was to get to 300 huts. But then I wanted to get to 400 before I turned 11. So we've just kept on going over the years because there's still more huts to get to, but it feels like we've done all the easy ones. So they're much more remote now, so they need, really good weather to get to them

Jonty: 14:10

and a hundred huts of the year. that's a pretty good tally.

Emilie: 14:13

Yeah, it definitely is.

Victoria: 14:14

it's nice to be creative and find, circuits and loops you can do which take you to different places and we really doing a bit of off track navigation as well. It's quite fun to, read the top map and have a look at different spurs and ridge lines and think, what can you connect up and what might work to take you to different places. I really quite enjoy stepping off the track into the forest and then just, being able to pick a route through the bush. Emily's really good at picking little off track, following little goat tracks and deer tracks through the bush.

Jonty: 14:46

Do you have any particular favorite type of huts? Like you visited a lot, so do you like the old forestry, so orange ones or the newer ones, or what's your preference?

Emilie: 14:54

my favorite hot color is probably cream. It's known as moss. With a red roof. And a bright red door. But I also really like little orange bibbs, tucked away like little treasures. If you're on an island and you are searching for treasure, they're just like that, like Campbell biv.

Victoria: 15:13

orange treasure, wasn't it?

Emilie: 15:14

It was the best thing in the world to see Campbell biv.

Jonty: 15:17

Have you got any particular favorites that you return to

Speaker 4: 15:20

or you'd like to return to?

Emilie: 15:22

Lots of people ask me this question, what's your favorite hut? And sometimes I don't even remember some that I've been to, but definitely one of my favorite huts is up the Whitcomb Pass called Wilkinson Hut, and it's absolutely so adorable, and I think it's the sweetest hut in the whole world.

Victoria: 15:39

it's got beautiful like original beach framing and so on, and you can put the big fire on often the huts that have like an emotional, memory attached to them, maybe it was a really hard trip or you were just, it was dark and you were just dying and your feet were falling off and you staggered in and little hut. Door swung open to welcome you. Often these have really lovely memories attached to them. Like we had a night at slatey Creek Hut, over the hope pass and, it's a pretty rustic and historic little place that might not necessarily be welcoming. I think at the time it had these big floorboards with cracks in them and the mosquitoes came out. I think most people just camp actually, but we didn't, that one always sticks in my memory because we met up with this lovely guy, this lovely hunter, and he was going up the valley. He said, oh, I'm just gonna go for a walk up the valley to look for a deer. And Emily must have been

Emilie: 16:31

seven or eight

Victoria: 16:32

or

Emilie: 16:32

something. Yeah, six, seven, or eight. And I was like, oh, can I come too? So we strolled up the river bed in the last rays of the sun. we stopped and just poking its head out of the bushes was a lovely young female deer. So we got that and had deer heart for dinner.

Victoria: 16:48

He cooked up deer heart, he said the deer was just paralyzed with fear standing there because Emily wouldn't stop talking.

Jonty: 16:54

Are there any particular areas in New Zealand that, you haven't explored as much, which you've got your eyes on to go and back some more huts?

Victoria: 17:00

It'd be lovely to get up to the North island and have another look through the range That was pretty. Awesome on it was like the section that as south island trampers, the taro range and the roughness of it. made us reminisce of the south island. It wasn't really a trail walker section, it was you know, a bit of a hardcore tramping section and we really enjoyed it.

Emilie: 17:21

We got one sunny day and 10 days of rain.

Victoria: 17:24

Yeah, the socks, he should have smelt the socks, knock a man dead at, six paces. And there's some other areas like Fjord and we spent 11 days down in Rocky, about this time last year and did the Northwest circuits and. Would love to go and, have a look at the southern circuit and go over the tin range. And some of the the vegetation and the ecology down there was just stunning as was seeing, kiwi fostering around in broad daylight. Now friend Paul Kow who wrote the book gone Bush, who's been to maybe 1300 huts across New Zealand. We were just visiting him and he got out all his fabulous old maps and was showing me this red line linking up. The south coast track with some lakes and so on and fjords. So I took photos. I'm not sure if those red lines will still amount to much, but still accurate. Yeah. But yeah, wonderful, lengthy and wild adventures. So hope hopefully, fingers crossed that summer brings us lots of

Speaker 4: 18:25

those.

Jonty: 18:26

What's the closest you've come to, I wouldn't say necessarily disaster, but there's some of the biggest challenges I guess you've had on trips.

Emilie: 18:32

Not very long ago, we had a bit of a disaster. It went a bit south. up Sudden Valley, which is off across the Horton Valley

Victoria: 18:42

I should preface this just by saying we've had a very good track record. For the past.

Emilie: 18:46

We haven't really had disasters that

Victoria: 18:48

much, seven years we have gone hungry. We have walked out 13 kilometers on one newley bar each, we did in the early days before. We really understood what top of Topper maps were and how to read them. Got ourselves a bit lost and found ourselves again. And on the roa we actually called search and rescue for two other parties, but never for ourselves. But yeah, as Emily is referring to, just very recently we had the very humbling experience of, getting extracted by, by search and rescue from a really difficult situation. Day four of a trip where, we walked in. And tried to get out over the tops and Gail forced winds. We were getting blown up our feet, forced us back down into the valley where we thought we would give walking out the valley a go,

Emilie: 19:43

but we couldn't cross this one last crossing it.

Victoria: 19:45

Was very dodgy on the way out. Had a few dodgy crossings and then got to. One last, very dodgy crossing and opted to divvy out under a tree and got dripped on all night. And it rained because the thought processes were that give it 12 hours more and the river will run out more and we will be able to cross. But We were wrong. It rained overnight. Which my inReach hadn't forecast much to happen. So unfortunately whatever the rain and the catchment, and we were right in the middle of gorge and unfortunately we were on the true right with nothing but cliffs above us. So we spent a good part of the morning climbing up spurs that led to bluffs and doing sketchy stuff, trying to get out, which probably in retrospect wasn't the best idea, but we really wanted to walk out under our own steam. And eventually we sat down on the, on some rocks and dried, dry

Emilie: 20:42

out our sleeping bags, dried our

Victoria: 20:43

sleeping bags, and just evaluated all the options. Did another weather check, saw that rain was coming. We had no way of getting. Back across. We were stuck under the clips and I struggled very much with pushing the SOS button myself. Because I've never had, an experience where I couldn't walk out under my own steam. And it was definitely very humbling to realize that, that was the situation a helicopter came and, we got winched out and flown back to safety and that was, The closest we've come to disaster. So thank goodness for New Zealand Search and Rescue. We've made a donation to them and sent them some lovely thank you cards. And really encourage anybody heading out to the outdoors to make sure that they've got, A PLB or an inReach and know when to use it.

Jonty: 21:37

That's the key thing. There's no point. If you've got it, you need to use it rather than being too proud to use it.

Victoria: 21:43

It was very interesting. I think people can definitely get caught in that trap. So something that perhaps needs to have a little bit more discussion around knowing, in yourself that it's okay, that's what they're there for. And when they picked us up, they said, yeah, thank you for calling us. We would much rather pull you out from the side of the river than go looking for you in a few days.

Speaker 4: 22:03

tell me a bit about the new book.

Emilie: 22:05

The new book is My story, of course, about me and my mom walking the length of in New Zealand, and it's, from my perspective, after my mom's book came out, we thought it would be nice to have a children's book about it so children could read about it and try and experience and see what it's like for themselves. And maybe that would encourage them to get outdoors and maybe even try the TA for themselves with their families.

Victoria: 22:28

so the new book is called Emily Walks, and it's available across New Zealand. It's been published by Potter and Burton, and yeah, it's a beautiful, colorful, bright, joyful book. We've worked together on it. Emily has produced some beautiful illustrations of her own that are in the book, as well as lots of photographs and almost like a diary as you walk through the different sections and capturing, the highlights for Emily through her 7-year-old voice. Including lots and lots of, magical encounters with nature

Jonty: 23:02

do either of you, write diaries or journals or how do you, capture and I guess remember the trips you've done?

Emilie: 23:08

On the ta I had a little diary that I would always take with me that we called the hot diary. So it would ask you like questions about how the day went. You could write something about it, whether in the south or north island, and then you would draw a picture about it or maybe write something about it if you wanted to. And so we sometimes just got those out and to flick through them and looked at some of the best parts and got some photos from on the phone or on the computer, and we wrote those down.

Victoria: 23:36

And often I would just get out my phone and maybe just write some notes in a draft email to myself. But I do like taking photographs. I'm not a particularly good photographer, but I do like taking photographs of things. But, for Emily, I think she went through about five of these little tramping diaries I always just loved her illustrations, time traveled today, distance covered how hard, it could be like a five star hard rating, eight hour day 20 k. And then there'll be this illustration that she's done that somehow is like me and her dressed in little fairy tutu's, skipping over the mud with birds flicking over our heads. So the kind of the joy. Creativity that came through in those tramping diaries.

Jonty: 24:21

Do you continue to do that or was that just on the ta?

Emilie: 24:24

Yeah, we still go tramping, so I still do diaries because you never want to lose memories of some of the most amazing things you've done. I've probably gone through at least 10 or 11 of these diaries now, and I'm nearly at the end of the one that I'm working on.

Jonty: 24:38

What's on your tramping bucket list or trip still to do?

Victoria: 24:42

some other lovely circuits here on the West coast including, the classic kind of serpentine Frisco up the head of the Mongo maybe over Matthias Pass. Mathias Pass was one that we had to abort. Earlier this year we did the Whitcomb pass over into the re and the plan was to come back over the Matthias Pass. But unfortunately the weather caught us and yeah, I guess we're just hoping to maybe get down south. We've got an invitation down to Queenstown and Monica to do some talks later this year. And we hope to go with the Tramping Club down there to explore some of their beautiful big backyard. And then maybe over summer we'll get ourselves up to the North Islands and get back into those Tara Ranges.

Peter: 25:28

So

Speaker: 25:31

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.