Peter Hillary tells a story about his father as a teenager, long before the world knew the name Sir Edmund Hillary.  

The way the story goes, he was a pimply-faced teenager with an exasperated teacher who really did not know what to do with this class of Auckland Grammar boys until apparently the very advanced in those days, idea of taking the whole class down to Mount Ruapehu. 

“Dad said for him getting down there was like love at first sight,” Peter recalls. “He immediately knew that this is what he wanted to do.” 

Years later, Peter still tells that story, because the truth is that conquering Everest did not begin on Everest at all. It began with a school trip to Tongariro, with cold hands and a mountain that would not let go of a young man’s imagination. 

“I think, in a way, it is that type of experience that comes through participating in one of these outdoor education programmes.” 

The story does not end there, because it was in the late 1960s, while working as an outdoor instructor in Birmingham, where Graeme Dingle noticed something troubling in the young people around him. He saw kids who felt lost in a world that never challenged them, kids who had never stood in a green field or walked along a seashore or felt the wobble of a kayak beneath them for the first time. 

“That sort of limits you as a human being,” he says. 

It was not something Graeme wanted for the young people of New Zealand, so he did what anyone with a big idea and a good friend might do. He wrote a letter. It was addressed to his friend and mentor, Sir Edmund Hillary, and in it he asked a simple question: what do you think about building a mountain-based outdoor education centre? 

Sir Ed wrote back. 

As far as a mountaineering centre is concerned, I have mixed feelings…I personally feel the greatest potential would be an ‘adventure course’ much closer to the centres of population in the North Island – Say at Ruapehu – which can be easily reached by lots of people.

And that was that. A letter passed between two friends became the Outdoor Pursuits Centre, and a simple idea grew into something that would go on to shape hundreds of thousands of young lives. 

Over fifty years have passed since that letter was written.  Along the way, the organisation’s name changed to honour our founding Patron, Sir Edmund Hillary, who generously gave his name to the Trust. Yet while the name above the door changed, the ethos inside has not moved an inch. It remains firmly rooted in the shared philosophy of Sir Graeme Dingle and Sir Edmund Hillary. Every week, young people still arrive at the centres to be challenged, to be supported, and, most importantly, to be given the chance to believe in themselves.  

It is rarely the big, dramatic moments that stay with them. More often, it is the small ones, gathered quietly over a week, that end up shaping a person for years to come. 

They remember:

These are the memories that quietly shape people over time, and they are the same stories that get told again and again, around campfires, or across dinner tables many years later, when someone says “remember when” and the whole room leans in. 

They are the moments we look forward to sharing in Hillary Outdoors – The Adventure Continues.