We had been mulling over changing our name to Backyard Events for quite some time and finally decided to do it in December 2007. We felt that Adventure Events didn't really reflect who we are. We prefer running the low key friendly type of events that feel like a group of friends getting together in the backyard to play a game of cricket. And we like to think of the Port Hills and Banks Peninsula as our backyard and that's where the majority of our events take place.

History...
Craig started communicating in 2002 with Andy Rhodes via the NZ Mountainbike Web about a desire for local events that were a bit more challenging for the cross-country rider than was currently on offer. And so Adventure Events began.

We decided to organise a series consisting of different types of events with points being combined across the events. Our theory was that often people do well in different disciplines but may not ever be the best in any one of them. Having a variety of events we hoped that the people winning the series would be different from the people winning individual events and to a degree this has happened, but it seems some people just are good at everything! The disciplines were cross country, hillclimb, downhill, endurance and navigation.

Our knowledge consisted of Craig and Andy having competed in a few events and so looked at events and courses from a riders perspective, and Rebekah who had hung around the registration and timing tables at a few events and watched what happened there. Still, we were fairly clueless as to how much work was involved in getting events off the ground. In the first year (2002) we ran a XC in Victoria Park (because there wasn't time to organise anything at an alternative location), ran the MTB adventure at McDonald Downs and piggybacked on three other organisers' events to use their results to allocate points for the series. We had met at the end of July and the first event was held mid September so we were fairly frantic getting the series advertised. At the start of the following year we ran a 4 race evening series in Victoria Park thinking they'd be fairly low-key, but even these took quite a lot of work and we decided that it wasn't really fair to our children while they are young to be so busy, so haven't run them again.

In the second year (2003) we began working on a cross-country course at Mt Vulcan near Omihi. This was quite well received so we continued to work on the Vulcaniser course each year to further improve it, and even held a round of the New Zealand National Series there in 2006. We set out to run events that were aimed more at the serious riders and this course certainly acheived this! However, we realise that there are also a lot of people who want to take part in events but without too much training so we added a shorter option to the exisiting two at McDonald Downs.

We dropped downhilling from the set in 2003 as downhilling and cross country developed seperate identities and ended up not having MTBO due to difficulty getting access to a suitable location. In 2003 we ran the hillclimb at Mt Thomas then found a more convenient location at Mt Evans in 2004. We had a break from that in 2005 then ran it again in 2007 but will probably not run it again as it wasn't financially viable with just 31 riders.

We aim to organise events that focus first and foremost on mountainbiking. We try to keep costs to a miminum by doing as much as possible by the good old kiwi DIY approach - we still do our website manually using Notepad! The cost of having things done more professionally ultimately would have to be passed on to you, the mountainbiker, and we think that you mostly just want to ride...

In 2007 we wanted to take things a bit easier so decided not to run McDonald Downs and to run the Vulcaniser through the McQueen's Valley MTB Club. We ran an evening hillclimb series at the start of the year and we are steadily working on getting a track finished at Living Springs. This takes up quite a bit of time but is very satsifying and the kids can come with us.