Newsletter, September 2018

Submitted by newsed on Fri, 07.09.2018

 

 

CONTENTS:

Download the printed version of the newsletter (12 pages colour), as a small 4 megabyte PDF file. (You will need Adobe Acrobat Reader or similar program installed on your computer. Broadband connection preferable.)

KATE's KORNER | AGM report 

2017–18 has been another busy and successful year for the Nelson Tramping Club. There has been some great work going on behind the scenes for the club that has enabled the tramping programme to, weekend after weekend, be offered to the membership. I want to thank the Committee for their hard work and support of the club’s vision and purpose.

We have such a great club with a dedicated and hard working Committee that allows us to do great things for the community like hut renovations and providing a fun way for people to get out and explore the region with like-minded people.   

We have completed two hut renovations this year: Mt. Fell Hut and John Reid Hut. Both have been a great success. We are currently looking at a couple of huts in the Matakitaki area that need painting. Watch the Programme for future working bees.

We have also introduced some new training sessions organised by Liz Henderson, Debbie Hogan (snow skills), Richard Walker (leadership) and Mike Glover (navigation). There is another course being planned for November that will include bushcraft and navigation run by Mike Glover and organized by Liz. Again, watch the Programme for updates.

 Our new system of assigning weekends to trip leaders is working well. I really appreciate all of the leaders for their efforts. We are always looking for more so please let me know if you are interested.

Currently, leaders only have to run 2–3 trips per  year of their choosing. They can swap dates with others. As always, the Programme is lacking in the easy–medium trip categories. These types of trips act as great introductory trips for potential members. If you can help by leading 1–2 of easier trips every year, it would greatly help the club round out and diversify our programme.

As you may know, the club is over 84 years old this year. The club archives, consisting of two cardboard boxes of records dating back to the 1940s, are now seeing the light of day. They make some interesting reading. For example, in 1956, the Committee included a ‘Lady Club Captain.’ (I imagine that trips including women in those days required a chaperone of some sort.) The annual subscriptions were $1.25 for men, $1.00 for women, and $1.50 for married couples!

We have yet to decide how best to preserve these documents, however, scanning them as a digital copy would be a good first step. We do have some keen historians in the club. So, if anyone is keen to write a historical summary based on the archives, please let me know.

One of the highlights of the year was Mike Drake’s Garden of Eden trip in south Canterbury. Mike worked tirelessly to organise the challenging trip including pre-trip meetings, many emails and Excel sheets that measured shared weights of gear to the gram! The trip was a great success, with us achieving the goal of traversing the Garden of Eden at New Year. It was a trip of a lifetime!

Mike is currently is planning a private trip from Molesworth Station through to the Wairau valley via the Severn and Leatham valleys in October.

Graeme Ferrier has been kind enough to head up our Constitution Review this year. The last time the constitution was revised was in 2005. So, it needed some tweaks and updates to bring it more in line with technology and the club’s current day-to-day functions. I want to thank Graeme for all of his hard work on this, plus Pat Holland and Ian Morris for their wise inputs. We have had some feedback, so will take a few more months to revise, then present for ratification at a future club night.

Further to the constitution review, will be a review of the Trip Rules this year. Recent discussions around safety on trips brought to light that our trip rules are out-of-date. (They don’t even mention the use of Personal Locator Beacons on trips.) So, once again we will review these and make sure they are up-to-date and current.

The Facebook page is continuing to be a great success in attracting new members and promoting the club to non-members. It is a great platform to show off the amazing places we visit, and the great fun we have, as well as providing a forum for non-members to ask questions and share information about tramping.

I look forward to another wonderful year of tramping with you lot! I wish you all a fun and happy year in the Hills and in the day-to-day life we all have in this beautiful place.

Kate Krawczyk, President

PHOTO COMPETITION | Results

On Monday 6 August, we had a brief AGM, then handed the evening over to Kathy Pantling from the  Nelson Camera Club. She is an experienced PSNZ judge, and delighted us with her cat and dog portraits, which are her speciality.

Always encouraging, Kathy explained her choices for the top three images in each category, which are listed below:

1. ABOVE BUSHLINE with NO human element
1st – Ray Salisbury
2nd – Ray Salisbury
3rd – Pat Holland

2. ABOVE BUSHLINE with human element

1st – Ray Salisbury
2nd – Pat Holland
3rd – Kate Krawczyk

3. Below Bushline with NO human element

1st – Ray Salisbury
2nd – Leah Parker
3rd – Debbie Hogan

4. Below Bushline with human element

1st – Ray Salisbury
2nd – Liz Henderson
3rd – Ray Salisbury

5. NATIVE Flora & Fauna

1st – Chris Louth
2nd – Mark Graesser
3rd – Leah Parker

6. HISTORIC – Pre 1990

1st – Ray Salisbury
2nd – David Blunt
3rd – Ray Salisbury

7. OPEN – Anything goes
1st – David Blunt
2nd – Leah Parker
3rd – Michele Cunningham

8. PEOPLE’s CHOICE – Kazuhiro Abe won the trophy.

It was fantastic to see 18 photographers supporting our annual competition, with a record of 151 photos! Changing the format from 6x4–inch prints to digital images was the right decision.

Let’s see how our finalists’ photos fare in the national FMC competition.

Watch this space for a slideshow of the winning entries on the club website:
http://nelsontrampingclub.org.nz/galleries

WRITING TIPS | TRIP LEADERS & SCRIBES!

Trip reports need not be extensive epistles, or feature award-winning writing. Just the facts, spiced with some memorable moments. Adding the total walking time may be helpful to future trip leaders searching our website database.

Following these guidelines will not only save the Newsletter Editor hours of extra work, but it will make it easier for others to read your trip report...

...so they might actually READ your trip report!

1. Write the report in MS Word, not an email. Don’t be lazy! Because an email does not contain proper formatting, and copying from an email deletes all paragraph returns - this means lots more work for the editor.

2. One space between sentences. We have moved on from typewriters to computers! Get with the times. If you put a double-space between sentences, and the article is justified during pagination, horrid ‘rivers’ appear down the columns.

3. Title: Add Date / Name of Track / Name of Forest-National Park / Leader’s Name. Remember to record all participant’s names, IN FULL. This will save the Editor having to refer to the club website or Facebook, trying to fill in the gaps.

4. Use humour ... but avoid ‘in-jokes unless they are obvious to the general reader. Ha, ha, ha.

5. Keep sentences short for easier reading. Avoid joining different ideas together with an ‘and’. Use paragraphs too!

6. House Style: we write numerals 0–12 in full (e.g. zero, one, two, three).
Do not abbreviate (nth, sth, hrs,) Contractions are fine (such as don’t, didn’t, we’ve). Acronymns (such as DOC) are acceptable. Use past tense.

7. People like seeing themselves in photos, and images of people are much easier to take than landscapes, (and print better at a small size in the newsletter). So, try to get at least one decent group photo. Pose the group facing the light (unless you know what you’re doing shooting contré jour).

8. Photos: Email only the best 4–5 shots to the Editor. Don’t just post 21 images on Facebook, and expect the on-line viewers to sift through all the rubbish shots to find the good ones. Spend 5 minutes choosing them.

Note: Facebook compresses the images so the low-resolution isn’t really suitable for printing in a newsletter.

Thanks for all your contributions! Keep 'em coming in...

 

Ray Salisbury
Web & Newsletter Editor

 

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