Summer walk and talk

A recent Whanganui Summer Programme excursion was a bus trip to the beach and historic lighthouse at Castlepoint in the Wairarapa. Photo/Supplied

The Whanganui Summer Programme runs throughout January - as it does every summer.

These trips usually go by bus to places of interest in the southern and central North Island. But what used to be called the Summer Nature Programme (SNP) has quite a history.

They originated in Tongariro National Park in the 1960s, when the former government department Lands and Survey was responsible for managing all national parks and scenic reserves.

Each summer, hundreds of participants would arrive over the holiday season and go on a series of guided day walks and attend a series of natural history talks at night. Other areas around New Zealand also ran programmes of varying length and intensity.

When the Department of Conservation took over from Lands and Survey in 1987, a big regional office was established in Whanganui where previously it had been in Palmerston North. There was no previous history of a SNP here, but DoC then had a mandate to cover all natural areas as well as things historical. This meant that when setting up a series of events for the first SNP in January 1988, we could include coastal walks and historic sites as well as traditional bush areas.

So with such interesting coastline and lots of interesting history, the programmes out of DoC in Whanganui started to cover all these new areas and give the programme much greater diversity.

For the first year we used DoC transport with private cars to get to places. This had difficulties with cars calling in at petrol stations and then never reaching the venue and some drivers were saying: why should I carry other participants and not get some money from them to cover costs?

It was also not suitable for places where start and finish points were different, such as beach walks. So the second summer we used a bus for many of the trips, and these proved so popular and economical that from then on buses were used for all trips on the programme.

Being all on one bus enabled us to keep everyone together, travel further afield and give interesting commentaries.

One noticeable change over the past 27 years is that people are becoming less active. Where once we would do mainly longish tramps into the back country, people now often want little or no walking.

In 2008 DoC decided to withdraw, as the programme co-ordinator and the bookings have shifted to the I-site.

A trust now runs the programme and gets ideas and offers to organise and run suitable events from many organisations, including DoC. Most trips still use a bus, but several are focused within the city and get about by walking.

If you have never attended a walk or a talk, why not try it out?

Ridgway Lythgoe is a retired DoC officer, keen environmentalist, tramper and traveller