A Single Guided Hike Became a Hiking Club

Twenty-three young people walked up to a waterfall and a wall of ancient San rock paintings at Medike Nature Reserve earlier this year, ate lunch at Marula Camp, and went home. Within weeks they had started their own hiking club, set up a WhatsApp group, and begun organizing trips the reserve had nothing to do with. The Endangered Wildlife Trust, which owns the reserve, says the pace of what followed surprised it.

The reserve sits in the Soutpansberg, the mountain range running east to west across the top of Limpopo province in South Africa. The club that formed there, the Caregiver Hiking Club, came out of an environmental capacity building program run for a group of Cricket South Africa beneficiaries who visited Medike earlier in 2026.

What actually happened on the first hike?

Two groups, led by interpretive guides working alongside four novice local guides, took the trails up to the waterfall and the rock art. The guiding was built around the Soutpansberg’s catchment: the argument that the mountain matters not only to the mountain but to every household downstream that depends on its water.

For many in the group it was the first visit to a nature reserve of any kind. That is the detail worth sitting with. The Soutpansberg is visible from the villages around it every day of these young people’s lives, and most of them had never been up it.

Why a hiking club is a conservation story

What the Endangered Wildlife Trust noticed was not the hike. It was what the group did without being asked. Members began sharing routes, photographs and accounts of their own trips in the WhatsApp group, and using it to advertise upcoming hikes to friends and neighbors who had not yet come along. The organization’s own assessment is that the peer-to-peer momentum did more to grow interest in a few weeks than a formal marketing campaign would have.

The next step is more ambitious, and the club is paying for part of it. Medike and the club are working toward a multi-day trail where hikers carry their own packs for up to three days, moving deeper into the mountain between rest points. The club has already bought three tents for the camping legs.

Writing for the Endangered Wildlife Trust, Joseph Razwinani of Medike Nature Reserve sets out the wider ambition: rather than treating tourism as something only the organization can run, the aim is for local ecotourism businesses to grow across the whole value chain, from tour operators and cultural tours to craft shops, local adventure guides and other heritage-based small enterprises. The reasoning is that this alleviates poverty and reduces human-wildlife conflict at the same time, by making the mountain worth more intact than otherwise.

Which zoos are behind this?

None that we could verify, and that is worth stating rather than skipping. ZooReviews traces the accredited zoological funding behind the African conservation work it covers, and on this project the trail is empty: the Endangered Wildlife Trust names no zoo or aquarium funder for the Medike ecotourism work, publishes no supporter wall we could open, and the partners credited in the account are a hiking club, a cricket development program and the reserve’s own staff. We are not going to invent a connection to fill the space. The organization’s species programs are a different matter and ZooReviews has covered several of them, including its vulture conservation training work.

The ending the reserve is going for

Razwinani’s closing line is the one that gives the project its shape. What began as a single hike has become a repeatable, bookable, income generating experience, and guided walking in the Soutpansberg is starting to look less like an outing and more like a movement, one where young people from the surrounding villages see themselves not as visitors to the mountain but as its custodians.

Three tents is a small number. It is also the sound of a group deciding it is going back.