The Otago Tramping and Mountaineering Club will celebrate the club centenary in 2023. While this sounds like a long way away, the club are planning to integrate three projects into a 'Pathway to the OTC / OTMC Centenary'.

The OTMC committee see the centenary as a great opportunity to celebrate our rich past, and recall past trips and activities into our current trip and social programmes.

At this stage we are actively working on three separate projects - a brief outline on each is included below, with much more information to be added as it becomes available.

The Pathway to the Centenary was presented at the club meeting on July 21, 2016 - a slightly abridged version of the presentation is available here (PDF 8Mb)

OTMC Photographic Archive

A photo tells a thousand words - and there have been many thousands of photos taken on club trips over the years. Our early years (1920's & 1930's) are pretty well recorded in our Hocken Library collection, but there is very little after that.
The club has been fortunate to be entrusted with the glass slide collection from the late Bruce and Lyall Campbell (both Life Members of the club). This collection of around 800 slides date from the 1950's to the early 1970's, and is a fascinating record of trips to many places we still visit today. The Campbell collection fills a void in our club archives, but has also made us realise just how important that these images are preserved for future generations to enjoy.
We know there are many more out there, so we are now officially seeking contributions of copies for the club archive. Our initial focus is club trips from the 1950's to the 1990's (basically the pre-digital era). The club is looking primarily for photos from club trips - ideally these will be dated, and locations and people identified, but this is not essential.
The club can undertake digital scanning of all photos from prints, slides or negatives. Once copied, all items will be returned to the owner, along with a full digital copy as a thank you from the club. In the event that a collection is donated to the club, it will be sorted into albums that will be lodged within the club collection at the Hocken (well sorted items is the key to locating and viewing items at the Hocken collection).
The club is looking at ways to make our archive more widely available - this can be via our website and other online methods. We intend to link our photo archive with other material we have, such as trip programmes and trip reports /diaries to allow our full story to be told.
If you are able to share your photographic collection with the club, then please contact us at this email address. All copyright will remain with the photographer (where known) or the owner of the originals.

Pathway to the OTC / OTMC Centenary

The Pathway to the OTC / OTMC Centenary is designed to focus on several notable events from our club history as we approach the 2023 centenary. These will allow us to celebrate our history, and provides several 'stepping stones' on our pathway to the centenary (the following is an initial list, we welcome any suggestions for further events). In celebrating each event, we will incorporate our social programme, our website, and in some cases will run a special trip.

2017: 10th Anniversary of the opening of the replacement Jubilee Hut - the new hut replaced the OTC's 25th Jubilee Hut, and was opened by the OTMC and DoC on May 10, 2007. The club plans to celebrate this with a day trip on May 10, 2017

2018: Remembering Trevor Mason. Trevor was tragically lost in a river crossing accident while participating in the OTMC Silver Peaks Marathon on 16 February, 2008. This accident remains one of the club's worst days (another member, Mary Clark, sadly died some days after a fall on a club trip in 1993) - it is so unbelievable that Trevor would be lost in Whare Creek, given the previous trips he had done (mainly alone). We have two options to pay tribute to Trevor-a special running of the OTMC Silver Peaks Marathon (not held since February 2009) or a repeat of the only day trip Trevor was able to lead (Nov 18, 2007 - Yellow Ridge / Rocky Ridge / Jubilee Hut / Yellow Hut). This trip should be held on 17 Feb, 2018 (for the marathon) or Feb 18, 2018 for the Silver Peaks tramping trip.

2018: 20 Years of the Ben Rudd Management Trust. The Ben Rudd property provides a tangible link right back to the first month of the formative OTC. After many years of debate, the OTMC formed the Ben Rudd Management Trust in 1998 - the initial 20-year term comes to an end on August 1, 2018. Our plan is to use this opportunity to share the importance of this property with members and others, focus on the life of the Flagstaff hermit Ben Rudd as we plan and agree on the future management of the property.

Other events further out…

2020: 30 Years at 3 Young St (clubrooms opened on June 21, 1990)

2021: 50 Years since the OTC was renamed to the OTMC

2021: 100 years since Ben Rudd moved to the current club property

2022: 1000 Committee meetings!

2022: 50th OTC / OTMC Bushcraft Course

100 Trips for 100 Years
(OTC / OTMC Centenary Project
 (to be completed during 2022 / 2023)

Both the photographic archive project and the Pathway to the Centenary have been planned to support '100 Trips for 100 Years'.
The vision for 100 Trips for 100 Years is to re-run 100 carefully chosen trips from the club's past, over a 12-month period. The committee have proposed to hold the 2023 Centenary celebrations over Labour weekend 2023 (2 months later than our anniversaries are normally held, but the additional day, and more settled weather are deemed important for the centenary). Therefore, 100 Trips for 100 Years will commence at Labour weekend 2022, and culminate with a Silver Peaks trip and a Flagstaff / Ben Rudd trip during the centenary weekend.
We are currently running between 60 and 70 trips a year - 100 Trips will plan for up to 110 trips (to allow for cancellations etc.) and will include evening, Saturday and Sunday trips, as well as weekend and longer trips. To support this, we have been compiling a complete database of trips the club has run - we are confident of being able to identify more than 95% of our trips (if not 100%). The earliest trip card appears to be from 1928, but we have now pretty well identified the trips the OTC ran between 1923 and 1928. Once this list is complete we will start cross-checking with minutes, annual reports, bulletins, outdoors and the email archive list to check for changes, and to try and identify where trips listed as 'mystery' etc. actually went to.
The 100 trips to be run will be well researched, and our plan is to provide complete historical information for each trip. Upon completion, we will be adding the trip report from the 2022/23 trip - once this is done we will look at making the complete publication available (probably electronically) as a record of the 100 trips.
To make this project special requires quite a bit of research, and aims to link out photo archive to out trips - this is the reason we have launched this now. We need to work on the final list of trips, and then complete research for 20 or so each year until 2022.
All three of the centenary projects are able to be integrated into our social programme, clubrooms display, bulletin and website / Facebook page as we head to the centenary, and really allow us to celebrate our wonderful history and remain connected with our valued older members. This page on our website is the launch page for the centenary, and will be expanded and updated as time goes on.