In next month’s Backcountry, you’ll read about our upcoming ‘Love Our Public Huts and Tracks’ campaign. We hope that together we can work to better protect and strengthen our network of public huts, tracks and bridges.
We have a number of activities underway over the next 12 months. With your help we are aiming to have every hut visited in the last few weeks of November 2024, so we can report first-hand on their condition (and the tracks and bridges taken to access them). We hope trampers, hunters, climbers and clubs from across the country will join us in planning their trips so the whole network is covered. As well as giving the hut a spring clean, we’ll ask everyone to report on the state of the hut, and also from looking through the hut book record the many ways they are being used to make a difference to conservation, being in the outdoors, and saving lives. Our next newsletter will tell you more about how you can get involved.
But to begin with, we are on a hunt for some great photos of our backcountry huts, bridges and tracks to use for the campaign. Especially ones that show their social life, with people using them, enjoying them and being ‘sheltered from the storm’.
If you have some great images that you’re happy for us to use, then send them through to Mick Abbott (mick.abbott@fmc.org.nz). It’d be most helpful if these could be named to include the hut name (or track or bridge) and also the name of the photographer. Send them as an attachment in an email, or if you have lots, or high-resolution images, then send them via Dropbox, Wetransfer or other file sharing link. All contributions will be acknowledged in the campaign materials.
Watch this space for more ways to get involved! And thanks heaps, as together we make a difference in protecting our public huts and tracks network. | 
