Our history
Founded on hope.
For me, Mastering Mountains has always been about hope — it's our founding principle.
At 26, I received my first neurological diagnosis, and feared any chance of a life of adventure was over — forever. (Read more about my health journey below.)
Rehabilitation brought me back outdoors, and gave me hope. In 2015, I summited Imje Tse (6,189m) in the Everest region of Nepal with the dream of helping others experience that hope. The Trust was founded on this dream, and that climb raised the money that seeded Mastering Mountains’s fund.
Since then, we've provided over $100,000 of support, positively impacting whole communities through our programmes. Today, that work spans four pillars — programme delivery, education, advocacy, and community — but at the centre of each is the same founding principle: helping people with neurological conditions find their way back to hope in the outdoors.
— Nick Allen, Manager & Trustee
Our milestones
2014: Sam (left) and Nick, on tramp where it all began.
2014 — An idea
Identified the need for community and support for physically active people with multiple sclerosis. The idea for Mastering Mountains was born during a five-day tramp through Kaweka Forest Park with Nick Allen and former board member, Sam Dawson.
2015 — Launch
Registered Mastering Mountains as a Charitable Trust in New Zealand. Launched our website as a platform to encourage others with Multiple Sclerosis (MS) to get outdoors and to seed a community of active people. Gained the support of Multiple Sclerosis New Zealand. Nick summited Imje Tse (6,189m) in the Everest region of Nepal, raising roughly $10,000 to seed the Trust's fund.
2016: Sue, our first grant recipient.
2016 — First grant
Partnered with Multiple Sclerosis New Zealand to administer the annual Mastering Mountains Grant, and awarded it to inaugural recipient Sue Dela Rue, from the Waikato region.
2017 — First corporate sponsor
Gained support from the Macpac Fund For Good.
2018 — First Expedition Grant
Partnered with World Expeditions to offer an annual Mastering Mountains Expedition Grant, and awarded the inaugural Expedition Grant, supporting Tracey Hall’s journey along the Inca Trail.
2025: Raffaela (left), first programme participant with FND.
2020 — Mentoring & FND
Watching grant recipients navigate their journeys made clear that mentoring, not just funding, was what people needed most; we began placing a much more intentional focus on mentoring. COVID also caused us to redefine the Expedition Grant for NZ-based activities only. Nick's diagnosis of Functional Neurological Disorder (FND), along with the significant lack of public awareness about the disorder, spurred Mastering Mountains to broaden its mission to include FND.
2023 — First group
Welcomed, Raffaela Dragani, our first grant recipient with FND. Formed our first cohort: a group of three, meeting monthly for online group catch-ups. This peer support proved deeply impactful, shaping the group-based model that underpins our programmes.
2024 — Education & first programmes
Recipient of The North Face Explore Fund. Developed our first psychoeducational resources and delivered our first educational seminars, setting us on a path toward a much greater emphasis on education. Wanting to formalise our service, we offered our first programmes.
2025: Adaptive Adventure Film Evening
2025 — Advocacy & film evening
Hosted our first Adaptive Adventure Film Evening to celebrate our 10th birthday. This event was a huge success that brought the wider community together to celebrate the stories of people getting outdoors despite disability, allowing us to advocate for people with disabilities in new ways. This laid the foundation for the launch of the Adaptive Adventure Film Festival.
2026 — Evolution
Refined our group model further, moving to provide local, in-person group rehabilitation programmes, building on what we'd learned since 2023 to make this kind of support more accessible. Welcomed two new board members — Jessie Snowdon and Dr John Alchin — to provide clinical oversight of our programmes.
Nick's Health Journey
For Nick Allen, Mastering Mountains embodies two passions: his love for the outdoors, and his desire to enable people with neurological conditions to enjoy the outdoors and achieve their adventure dreams. Like many New Zealanders, Nick's love for the outdoors began with a childhood spent outside. His passion for helping people with chronic neurological diseases, though, emerged from his own diagnosis — and the wish that someone had modelled for him a meaning-filled life spent outdoors, despite it.
As a young adult, Nick was an active climber, tramper and cyclist, propelled by a singular goal: to climb in the Himalaya. Not long after his 21st birthday, and despite his high fitness level, unexplained neurological symptoms began to cast a shadow over that dream. Weak, fatigued and often in pain, Nick found it increasingly difficult to walk. By the age of 24, he had become dependent on a mobility scooter to get around outside.
Two years later, at 26, Nick was diagnosed with Primary Progressive Multiple Sclerosis. The diagnosis was devastating. With no one to guide him or model an adventure-filled life after an MS diagnosis, Nick believed his life of adventure was over — forever.
With the encouragement and support of his family, Nick found stories of others who, after an MS diagnosis, regained mobility and went on to pursue their sports and hobbies. Although none of those stories were of hikers or climbers, Nick sold his mobility scooter and committed to an intensive physical rehabilitation journey with a specialist trainer, adopting the evidence-based approach to lifestyle, diet and exercise. After 2,000 hours spent doing lunges and squats (and plenty of other things!) at the gym, Nick was finally back outdoors climbing and tramping — and could hardly contain his joy.
But joy is meant for sharing. Nick longed to celebrate his recovery with like-minded people who also knew the highs and lows of a neurological condition, and who could help him navigate it in the outdoors.
In 2015, Nick achieved a dream he'd long written off as impossible: summiting Imje Tse (6,189m) in the Everest region of Nepal. Through that trip, he launched Mastering Mountains and raised roughly $10,000, seeding the Trust's fund.
In 2019, Nick led a small expedition to explore the unclimbed granite faces of a mountain range on Stewart Island. While rock climbing there, the team logged a total of ten first ascents.
That same year, Nick experienced a series of significant health setbacks. He found himself reliant on crutches to get outside and plagued by debilitating fatigue and chronic pain. In a few short weeks, he lost years of upward progress. However, in assessing this flare-up, his medical team determined that he had in fact been misdiagnosed — and rediagnosed him with Functional Neurological Disorder (FND) and Fibromyalgia.
FND is a strikingly under-researched neurological condition that is frequently misdiagnosed as Multiple Sclerosis. Like MS, FND causes the signals between the brain and body to become distorted; unlike MS, this distortion occurs for unknown reasons rather than from nerve damage.
Nick's diagnosis of FND, and the significant lack of public awareness about the disorder, spurred Mastering Mountains to broaden its mission to include FND — a decision rooted in the same founding principle of hope that started the Trust in the first place. It also planted the seeds of two of the four pillars Mastering Mountains stands on today: education, born from the need to inform people about a condition so often misunderstood and misdiagnosed, and advocacy, born from the need to speak up for those living with it. Despite the diagnosis change, Nick remains firmly committed to Mastering Mountains' original goal of helping people with MS, and hopes that he, alongside programme participants, might model meaning-filled lives spent outdoors — regardless of whether a person has MS or FND.
Nick is intensely interested in the literature around wellbeing and neurological rehabilitation, and reads actively in the field. He has been invited to speak at national and international conferences about his journey with FND, and hopes to one day contribute to research into FND rehabilitation himself. Raising public awareness of the condition — still so often misunderstood and misdiagnosed — remains one of his driving motivations.
Nick and his wife Rebekah live in Ōtautahi Christchurch, where Nick continues physical rehabilitation and works as a content creator. He heads into the Southern Alps and the Port Hills as often as he can.
Follow Nick on Instagram.
Nick Allen, on the summit of Imje Tse (6,189m) in the Everest region of Nepal - 2015.
Nick Allen, with Allie Rood (left) and Mark Heighton (right) during their climbing mission on Stewart Island - 2019.
“We simply need … wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in. For it can be a means of reassuring ourselves of our sanity as creatures, a part of the geography of hope.”
- Wallace Stegner