Alice Guerin and her partner Dan O'Neill were in a mission to climb as many peaks as possible across Aotearoa throughout the summer of 2023 and 2024 all while raising funds for Voices of Hope!
Here are Alice's reflections from her fundraising efforts.
About a year ago my partner Dan and I decided we wanted to go on our most epic adventure yet, to hike to the peak of 30 mountains across all of New Zealand! We spent any time we had planning and honestly, not much went to plan.
Being flexible and adjusting our plan was one of the most important things I learnt to do this summer. We had 130km winds, rain and hail but the main thing that kept us going was we new it was so much bigger an us. Not only were we raising money for Voices of Hope, a course so close to my heart, we were creating a documentary of our whole journey.
We started out thinking the theme of our summer would be that physical health and getting out in nature is so important for your mental health but it ended up being so much more than that.
For me, doing these 30 peaks helped me to realise how resilient I am. I’m not going to lie to you… I didn’t enjoy every peak, especially at the start. Though I kept going and absolutely fell in LOVE, we ended up doing some of the most challenging hikes in New Zealand like mountain Taranaki.
We set what we thought would be an unachievable goal for the summer as we thought we would run out of time or energy to be honest so that 30th peak was extremely emotional and something I’ll never forget.
This feels like just the start of striving for goals I never knew would be possible.