Ranger Roundup (2021)

May 2021 week saw the holding of the first ever TRA Ranger Roundup at Arm River Camp in northern Tasmania. This was a fantastic opportunity for 30 members to meet for the first time, share war stories and listen to each others experiences.
We kicked off with a welcome to Big River Country and a cleansing smoking ceremony by Hank Horton. Following our AGM, we tucked in to the first of the fantastic catering provided by Wendy and Linda of Peppermint Ridge catering.
The rest of the day was spent on presentations by various experts in their field. These covered wilderness management, fire regimes in the World Heritage Area, whale strandings and a behind the scenes look at search and rescues by the Tasmanian Police SAR crew.
After dinner we had a look at the 2019 World Ranger Congress and the TRA Ranger Relay major fundraiser for 2021 (more about this soon !)
Next morning we had an overview of the Walls of Jerusalem visitor management project by Daniel, which featured some new low impact building techniques .
Many of our parks feature heritage huts, so it was great to have Ian from the Mountain Huts Preservation society show us the dying art of shingle splitting, which was followed by some track maintenance works on a local track.
Overall it was a huge success. There is a lot of work goes on behind the scenes to pull these events off, and all attendees agreed it was well worth while and needs to happen again.
Congratulations and a huge thanks to everybody that was involved in pulling it off !