Love our Huts and Tracks

A HUGE THANK YOU to everyone who participated in the Love our Huts and Tracks campaign this November.

You have helped preserve a vital part of New Zealand’s backcountry heritage, ensuring it remains safe, welcoming, and ready for use by all. Your involvement shows a true commitment to the well-being of our community and the spaces that bring us together.

Together, you have visited over 530 huts to give them tender love and care. It was wonderful to see so many Kiwis out there enjoying the mahi and giving huts so much attention and a thorough clean. Mattresses were being dragged outside, toilets and windows scrubbed clean, axes sharpened and hopefully, some fun memories created while doing it all. Your photos from the field inspired many others to join in and your reports will help us build a useful database for everyone involved in maintaining the backcountry network.

It’s not completely over yet…

While the campaign has officially finished, we encourage you to continue doing some hut-loving over the summer, if you wish. You are still able to register, check which huts require TLC and download a checklist to take with you.

Thank you again for your awesome mahi! And if you wish to continue showing some love to our huts, here are the ones that are still waiting for some attention:

Entering data after your trip

To enter data from your trip, please use the link below.

Your photos from the trip can be uploaded via WeTransfer.

With data from over 500 huts, it will be important to receive all the photos in a common file structure, and format. Attached is a handout to take you through the steps.

By sharing data from your activities, you’re helping demonstrate the real, lasting value of our huts and contributing to one of the largest citizen science projects focused on backcountry conservation.

We know it takes a bit of time—and we’d all rather be outdoors—but every piece of data you enter helps us build a powerful knowledge base. With this shared information, we can make informed decisions and advocate for the best possible care for these huts.

Register your trip

Use the form to select your hut, and also tell us details of when you might go, the number of people you are going with, and the planned route. It’s fine if dates, party size and routes change. If you are experiencing issues with the registration form, please try using Chrome browser.

Thanks so much for being involved!

Junction hut. Photo: Thiago Amaral

Why Love our Huts and Tracks campaign?

There’s a special feeling that comes when you round the corner on a track and see, at the edge of a clearing, a hut’s simple roof line and, with it, the prospect of a fire and a warm night.

We love our huts. They are places packed with stories, glimpses of which can be found in the hut book, the dripped wax and the worn surfaces that speak of the many nights people have spent protected from the elements.

Each of our public huts is a portal to the great outdoors, a place from which we step out into the taiao/ nature and a multitude of backcountry experiences. But we do our public huts and tracks a disservice if we only focus on their individual charms. Our network of public huts and tracks is so much more. It is the backbone of how, over many years, we have been able to care for nature and keep ourselves and each other safe in the backcountry.

FMC believes this needs to be protected and celebrated. The Love our Huts and Tracks campaign created time and space in November 2024 for the outdoors community to celebrate, care and protect our backcountry network.

What’s involved?

A huge amount of volunteer mahi from you. Besides visiting a hut, scrubbing it down thoroughly, packing out all the rubbish and checking on each hut’s condition, you have hugely contributed to the success of this project by studying the hut books, reporting back on the use of the huts, the condition of each hut and supported your findings with photos.

At the start, we sent out a pack with a checklist and some other material to take with you when visiting a hut. Due to slow delivery times, we discontinued sending out packs, but the checklist is still available for you to use if you wish to do more hut-loving.

The hut health-check reports, which you have contributed, will form the basis of a draft strategy reporting on the current state of our public network of huts, tracks and bridges, and the options on how we can together protect and strengthen this network. A workshop mid-next year will bring together those involved in maintaining, protecting and managing the backcountry network to consider these options and chart a path forward. The Department of Conservation, Backcountry Trust, Permolat and other organizations are all supporting this campaign.

Many partners and kindred organizations have joined this campaign. With support from generous sponsors Love Thy Land, Venture Outdoors and Bivouac Outdoor we were able to give away prizes to some lucky participants.

Nelson tramping club at Beeby’s hut, Mt Richmond Forest Park

FAQs

The campaign is officially over, but I caught a hut-loving bug. Can I still register?

Absolutely. Even though the campaign if officially over, we do not want to stand between you and your hut-loving activities this summer. Please do register your hut visit, so we can keep the track of which huts have received the attention. Feel free to download the checklist and upon your return, upload the data and photos. We know it’s quite a bit of work, but this is an important step and we are thoroughly grateful for it.

I’m back from a trip, what do I do now?

You can enter your findings here and upload your photos via WeTransfer. We’ve also prepared guidelines to help you with uploading the photos – please make sure you use the right naming structure, so we don’t lose your photos! If you have any issues or problems, please contact Masha – masha.oliver@fmc.org.nz – or Mick – mick.abbott@fmc.org.nz

I decided which hut I want to visit, but it’s not showing up on the registration list.

If the hut you want to visit is not on the list, it means it has already been taken by someone else. To avoid disappointment, please, check the above lists of the huts  still available. We also suggest having a plan B in mind before starting the registration process.

Which huts are still left to sign up for?

As of start of December, there are still about 350 huts left to be registered. Please see the North Island huts and South Island huts lists for details.

Get in touch

For more information, please contact:

General information – loveourhuts@fmc.org.nz

Campaign and media inquiries – mick.abbott@fmc.org.nz

Clubs contacts – North Island: emma.gregg@fmc.org.nz, South Island: raymond.ford@fmc.org.nz

Keep in touch

You can celebrate your campaign achievements  on our  Love our Huts FB group or Instagram, where you can show off your love for the huts and share it with others. If you have any stories and photos to share with us, please do get in touch via loveourhuts@fmc.org.nz

Handy downloads and links to read and share:

Mid King bivvy. Photo: Neville Palmer