This International Women’s Day we are celebrating Ellie Berry, Leave No Trace Advanced Trainer and Outsider Magazine’s ‘Woman of the Year’ 2023
Ellie who been working with Leave No Trace since 2018, delivering multiple Awareness Courses, corporate ESG days, workshops, community events as well as being a key part of the Hot Spot project.
When she is not working for Leave No Trace, Ellie spends every minute she can in the outdoors, both as an advocate and adventurer.
Last summer, her biggest adventure to date, was solo climbing all 275 mountains on the Vandeleur-Lynam’s list. That is mountains measuring 600m+, with a prominence of 15m.
Ellie completed the feat in 50 days, 5 hours 45 minutes, beating the previous record by almost six days. Despite tough moment and unrelenting rain in the latter part of the walk she kept going.
Prior to that in 2019, Ellie was the first person along with her partner, Carl to have completed all 42 National Waymarked Trail in Ireland – that’s totalling an impressive 4,000km!
While she always been invested in the natural environment, it was the decision to leave Dublin in 2017, which really changed her life for good. Along with her partner, Carl they handed their apartment keys back and began a new walking adventure, chronicling it all on adventures on Tough Soles, a YouTube channel.
“I know that my love for being outside in any capacity is what grounds me and makes me the happiest. I love outside seeing new places, making every week feel like it was a month long. “
Talking about her latest mountain adventure she said: “When the opportunity to do the Vandeleur-Lynam’s Project came around, there wasn’t a moment of stopping to ask “why”, it simply felt like I was being offered this chance, and I jumped at it.
I really love the outdoors, and this was just another possible project idea that would have me out in the mountains for most of the summer!
Despite the inclement weather conditions in the latter part of her hike, Ellie found the strength to continue.
“It feels very Irish for the biggest hurdle of this project to have been the rain – but here we are. While June was sticky and hot, July was then the wettest July on record, and there were several moments where I was almost washed away, literally and emotionally.
She said:
“Your life shrinks to the simple things when you’re on adventures like this. Life is stripped back to sleeping, walking, eating and recovering. Your world is your gear, the landscape, and the weather. And the weather was just bad.
“One small positive side to the bad weather conditions was that, on some of the days where I couldn’t see what was ahead of me, I was calmer climbing the big mountains. In many ways, this whole project was an exercise in self-belief. “
