⛰️#60 - RIP Wayne, Mags in Huts, Rogue Ducks, & More.

And we are back with the 60th weekly NZ Hiking Newsletter.

That’s definitely not me procrastinating from writing this while at Ahuriri Bridge Campsite 🤥

p.s. I’ll write about my experience with a quilt next week…hopefully Cody from Kiwi Ultralight will reply to some of my questions (when I message him). If you have any questions about quilts, let me know at [email protected].

This week is pretty quiet on the hiking news front. But as usual, I'll let you know what’s going on in the hiking scene in New Zealand, along with other related bits and pieces I find interesting.

Alright, let’s get into it.

🌱 All Trails Rates The Queenstown Lakes District

Personally, I’m not a fan of All Trails. Yet, it’s a popular app worldwide and helps thousands discover new trails close to wherever they are. I’m not sure how much influence they’d have in terms of getting people to travel to specific places for the trails, but if they have any, Queenstown can look forward to some local trails becoming more popular.

Queenstown made the list for All Trails’ Top 8 Travel Worthy Destinations in 2026 🥳

All Trails loved Queenstown’s goal of becoming the first tourist town to have a carbon-zero visitor economy by 2030.

The four trails they list in the press release:

1. Queenstown Gardens Loop

2. Ben Lomond Track via Skyline Gondola

3. Lake Alta Track

4. Bob’s Cove Track

Read what other destinations made it here.

RIP Wayne Martin, Longtime Owner of Bivaouc Outdoor

In a piece of information I probably should have picked up on in March 2025, Bivoauc Outdoor owner, Wayne Martin, sold the business after 34+ years at the helm. Sadly, after a long illness he passed away a couple of weeks ago (a nice message from BCT’s Rob Brown here).

I did some reading on Wayne Martin and he seemed like a good bloke, with an interest in the outdoors and chemistry, and always did right by his staff.

Below is a short video from Wayne discussing the origins of Bivouac Outdoor and how they grew to 11 stores nationwide in such a competitive space.

The new owners of Bivouac Outdoor, Brittain Wynyard & Co Limited’s are a distributor of outdoor, adventure, and lifestyle products in NZ. From what I can tell, Bivouac (that’s not a fun word to spell), won’t be going anywhere soon.

If you’ve got any good stories about Wayne, I’d love to hear them…[email protected].

😹 Hiking Funny

🗒️ Other Track News Etc.

• To Leave Mags or Not. It’s a simple question that I’d never thought about, but it got me thinking…Jonty posted on Facebook:

  • is it acceptable, to be encouraged, or discouraged, to leave copies of outdoors related reading materials such as Wilderness, Backcountry, or National Geographic in huts? Doing so goes against the leave no traces ethos, but they are often a welcome sight, and worst case can be used as fire starters.

What would you do? I never thought it’d be bad, but the Leave No Trace principle caught me off guard. Turns out, the first 25 replies put it to bed, they’re a great addition to huts…and the Federated Mountain Club has actively encouraged it in the past.

• LandSAR Go Good. Imagine you’re curled up in bed on a stormy night before getting a message at 10:24pm that people are up 💩creek needing a rescue. It wouldn’t be an easy yes for anyone. Lucky for the party of eight huddled in a 3-person tent near Waipakihi Hut (Waikato), five LandSAR members were good to go and set off on what would be a journey of 34.37km, with 2,953 metres of elevation gain that’d see them awake for 30+ hours. But the result was a success with good decisions made. The full story gives you all the details.

• Mallard Ducks Go Rogue. The harmless duck we’ve seen all our lives. Pretty much vegetarian, besides the odd insect or snail for protein when breeding. But a few Twizel Mallards recently jumped on the carnivore trend and started eating pūteketeke chicks. Full story here.

• Love Our Huts Gets International Press. There was a nice article in The Guardian about the Love Our Huts campaign.

  I like the quote from volunteer, Suzie Bell:

  “Many horrendous things are going on around the world, and it feels overwhelming. But I’m a big believer in finding stuff you can fix within your circle of control,”

  She’s not wrong, we can fix up huts. It’s great to see the campaign getting international traction. Full story here.

  *yes, I still need to go out and clean the hut I signed up for.

• Enlightened Equipment In A Bad Spot. If you’re familiar with US backpacking gear company, Enlightened Equipment (est 2007), it’s likely because of their quilts. Well, it turns out, Enlightened Equipment has a sister brand, Defence Mechanisms (est ~2019) targetting a totally different audience.

  That’s fine, but the marketing and actions around the latter brand has been creating some ethical and moral discussions in niche threads on reddit recently. That might be coming more mainstream soon, with a well put together reddit thread explaining everything.

  It’s a clear sign that politics and the outdoors aren’t mutually exclusive.

🧔‍♂️ What I've Been Up To...

After an awesome evening at the Lake Sylvan campsite with some friends. We split up on various adventures the next day with a few of us going up to Conical Hill on the Routeburn. At a little under 30km in length, it’s a big day but is one of the best day trips in the country.

This weekend might see me on two new trails...pending weather. We’re at Ahuriri Bridge campsite, so we have a few directions we can head. That’s fun.

Have a great week, hike it up.

As always, reply to this email (or message me on Whatsapp +642041702764) with anything and everything…I’m happy to chat.

Chur,

Jub

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