Newsletter Summer 2009

Over the last 12 months, the Walker's Association of Ireland has increased activity compared with the previous year. Slowly but surely it is becoming known as a strong resource in many areas as outlined below.

The WAI ran a very successful winter programme. The first talk was on "Walking Holidays in the Tatras and South West Crete" and this was followed by talks on the Scottish Munros and the Camino de Santiago, as well as a Table Quiz attended by about 100 walkers. Two Modern Navigation courses were also held, with a waiting list in place for the next course (see below). A photohike was held in April in Glendalough, which was also booked out.

Over last winter WAI organised a consultation for OSI regarding the move from Trailmaster to their new online mapping system, Geolives. More recently, the WAI have had a number of consultation meetings with the Ordnance Survey of Ireland in relation to their proposed changes to the 1:50000 map series. In fact it was WAI that broke the news of the proposals with potentially radical changes to map layout and grid system to the hillwalking community generally. The OSI tell us that the comments that were made will definitely be considered in the revision of the map series.

The next twelve months are also promising to be just as busy. A draft programme of events going forward includes:

22nd October - talk on Mountain Rescue
7th November - course on Modern Navigation (Geolives and Trailmaster)
19th November - talk by John Shackleton (IRC) on Antarctica
20th January - Table Quiz with any profits being donated to Mountain Rescue
18th February - Talk on summiteering
18th March - Talk on the Pyrenees

In addition, we will also be organising a photohike in October (date to be confirmed) and a day's seminar/workshop in Feb/Mar on topics of interest to hillwalkers who are not quite beginners, but would like to take the hiking experience to the next level (eg navigation, campcraft, modern navigation, gear, photography, first aid etc).

Finally, the WAI now have an active website with information on holidays, proposed changes to OSI maps and much more. For example the section on Challenge Walks has had 10s of thousands of page views so far this year.

For further information on all the WAI events, please go to http://www.walkersassociation.ie