Hiking Boots for Trail walks & Beginner tramps

@waynowski some great advice there. As you say, it's always great to get several opinions and never buy the first thing you see. Make informed choices, while also trying to keep to your own budget. Great stuff wayno :)

Chipping in to endorse the Hi Tec boots and Osprey packs. I had a Rainbow parka one time (urethane technology) and really liked it but now I've gone lighter and wear 2 jackets for serious rain - 200g GoLite gortex and a $10/100g driducks underneath. The highly breathable driducks can be strengthened and waterproofed further where the pack straps sit (extra pressure forcing water in to your base layer) with electrician's tape - a paint-on version of a latexy amazing paint that goes very well on stretchy fabrics such as socks etc. I've waterproofed a pair of ice handling gloves with the stuff and am yet to test them in rainy winter conditions but yee ha, Stewart Island here I come next month. I wear them upside down so the tough already waterproofed layer is now on the back of the hand, not the palm. I've also got a knitted pair of possum merino arm warmers with a thin glittery underlayer of arm warmers (reflector?) for the all day rain of Stewart Island. My arms get cold and these babies keep them cosy. I wear short sleeves on Stewart Island as I've scored a s/s Coolmax shirt from Frank which he was never going to wear. For these 10 day trips, one needs a fast drying base layer after it's washed, so the usual Mountain Design Transition shirt I wear in the cooler seasons is not going to cut it. You need all of these strategies to keep warm with a BMI of 20...

@Honora. I go along with all that. I wear Ninja freezer gloves, full PVC coating for 'serious'. About $19 from yer neighbourhood Protector Safety. It's what the freezer workers use. I think for beginners, it's helpful to have a one-stop store they can trust. MacPac's good. Rebel Sport would seem to be useful than Kathmandu ?.

@Proactive. They sound good value. Are they flexible and what's the lining made of? Doh! Just checked out my gloves and they are Ninja's ICE HPT. Got them at Bunnings - dirt cheap I recall. They've got some sealed layer on the palmar surface. They are made from some sort of material a bit like a cheap wetsuit - not neoprene though, more spongy. They say they're waterproof but a colleague says not really so I've sealed them some more. Be good to see how they perform all day in the rain.

Rub it in Honora! I think the last time I had a BMI of 20 I was 14.... :D

I'm staying this small as I observe the little people can keep tramping into even their 90's (Katie Leggoe). I've got a mate who's just turned 80 and exceeded doing 80 good efforts in the preceding 80 weeks. >600 m height gains etc. Margaret Clark is the ultimate inspiration for so many people down here. As long as the bone density is good, it's OK to be small. Mine was 136% for my age a few years ago but menopause takes its toll. I slow cook bones, winkle out the gritty bone marrow, chew on chicken bone ends, eat all the gristle and scoff down Dr Mercola's joint formula. Having salmon 4x a week too but sardines have more bones so are better. To be this small, I have to eat nutrient dense food a lot of the time. No scones for morning tea anymore. Coconut yogurt, kefir, berries and chia seeds instead.

On the train home from Wellington back to Masterton one evening I spotted this slightly built young lass with a sodding great alpine pack bigger than she is. Of course I had to find out all about what she'd been up to. Turns out she's just returning from her first climb of Aspiring and was totally pumped. Great conversation. If I was about 100 years younger ... oh well. Or a girl I knew rock-climbing at Mt Eden Quarry who could probably not have done a chin-up to save herself, but could out-climb the boys with sheer flexibility, balance and smarts. (That's another whole period of my life. At 14 I can recall the quarry machinery still squealing and grinding in the wind while in French class - two years later we were gardening off the loose rocks and putting up the very first easy routes.) So nah - size has sod all to do with it. It does change the particular aspect of what you are good at, but overall it makes very little difference. (I'm 184cm and 95kg and was always fast over rough ground, but I'm a saddo at gaining altitude).

Do you know any big solid heavy brutes still going into their 80's in the hills? I meet quite a few men getting on in years with this build who flagged their chosen sport a few decades before. Mind you, most of them played rugby! I believe if the muscles get too powerful for the joints, they will trash the joints too. My lean brother of 61 years old hoofed it up Avalanche Pk the other day in 1hr 35 minutes - 1050 m height gain and back down in 1 hr 30 minutes. He doesn't even use a walking pole. Go Bro!

Nah - all the older guys I know from Masterton TC are all lean, mean old buggers. The very well known tramper John Rhodes is a classic, still formidably fast in his 70's. He does gym work most days. Fortunately I may have good genes, my father at 87 this year may well be one of the few men of his age around Auckland who still has both his own knees and hips. And indeed the very first thing I'll tackle when the time comes to do some real tramping again is to lose a certain 10kg of mining camp food I seem to have accumulated recently. One of the most inspiring of the lot were John and Nancy (surname escapes me this late at night). They'd spent decades in the Tararuas. John passed away some years before I met Nancy. She and some friends celebrated her 80th year climbing Mitre (1571m, 1100m climb from the hut up your classic, steep rough old Tararua track.) Sadly closer to her 90's she was confined to a wheelchair, but remained a lively club member and an absolute encyclopedia on the Tararuas. Literally she could tell you about virtually every spurline, ridge, gully and route in the entire range.

its the pounding caused by the extra weight, more weight causes more force when you land exp going downhill , thats what does your joints in... thats why the best long distance runners are so scrawny, apart from the fact it takes less energy to move a lighter body... to absorb calcium you have to eat an adequate amount of fat with every meal. low fat diets result in low calcium absorption, low fat dairy food is BS because you'll never absorb the calcium properly and other minerals that also rely on fat to be absorbed.... i think magnesium is another mineral like that... and consuming a lot of fat doesnt make you fat, sitting around doing nothing and eating too much sugar and refined carbs makes you fat. most brown bread still contains around half white flour in it.. so dont think brown bread isn't refined carbs...