Who we are
Orienteers at heart
Our story
TrailBlaze started in 2024 with a simple observation: New Zealand's navigation and trail sports deserved better gear and better events, run by people who actually do them.
Two years on, we run the country's biggest schools orienteering series, deliver championship events for clubs, and are building new trail runs and adventure races from Auckland to Christchurch. Three of us run the business. Around 40 paid crew, course setters, starters, controllers, and marshals, put those events on the ground with us.
We're still on the start line ourselves, and still convinced the best place to be is outdoors.
What drives us
We're not an events company that discovered the outdoors. We're outdoors people who learned to run events, because we wanted the events to be better. Every course we set, we'd want to race. Every first-timer who finishes and asks "when's the next one?" is the whole point.
The core team
Callum Wishart
Director
Event lead, course obsessive, the one answering your emails at odd hours.
Neill McGowan
Operations Manager
Course designer and entries manager. Delivered world-ranking-level orienteering as Event Director of the Auckland Triple Crown.
Debbie McGowan
Sales Manager
Keeps customers happy and the gear moving.
The crew
Events don't run on three people. We've paid around 40 crew to work our start lines, finish chutes, road crossings, and control sites: course setters and controllers, starters and timekeepers, marshals and first aiders. Most of them are orienteers, trail runners, and adventure racers themselves, so they know what a good event feels like from the inside.
That's how a 22-event term with 2,500 students a week actually happens, and it's why we can scale a single race day up or down without dropping the standard.