Buying a gift subscription to Wilderness paid off in a big way for one lucky subscriber.

Chris Beech of Blenheim is the winner of the Wilderness 2019 Super Summer Subscription promotion, walking away with more than $5000 of top-of-the-line tramping gear from MSR, Therm-a-Rest, Bridgedale, Vasque, Light My Fire, BioLite, Bushnell and Silva.

A long-time subscriber herself, Beech’s name was drawn for the gift subscription she bought for her daughter and her partner.

The email informing her she’d won was “a complete surprise”.

“Initially I thought it was spam, so I called the Wilderness office and it was confirmed straight away,” she said.

“Usually whenever we’ve ‘won’ something on an email, it comes from Nigeria or Thailand.”

Beech and her husband have had a lifetime of farming and tramping in the high country – their favourite areas now being Kahurangi National Park, Nelson Lakes and the Richmond Ranges.

She is rapt with the prize and looks forward to trying out the gear – particularly the lightweight sleeping bags and MSR Carbon Reflex 2 tent.