First Light Travel Tree Planting April 2023

Last Friday, armed with gardening gloves and good intentions, our office team stepped away from their desks and onto a tree planting site on Coronet Face (just below one of our ski fields - Coronet Peak) to help plant 6000 juvenile beech trees in support of our local volunteer organisation, Arrowtown Choppers.

A typical day on any one of our First Light Travel or our sister company New Zealand Trails trips will see you wander through towering ancient beech forest, brushing past native ferns and shrubs, while an orchestra of native birdsong provides the perfect soundtrack to your walking holiday.

Year after year, we proudly share such experiences with our manuhiri (visitors) and therefore are incredibly passionate about doing our part to protect and regenerate our native flora and fauna for future generations of visitors to enjoy.

Last Friday, armed with gardening gloves and good intentions, our office team stepped away from their desks and onto a tree planting site on Coronet Face (just below one of our ski fields - Coronet Peak) to help plant 6000 beech seedlings in support of our local volunteer organisation, Arrowtown Choppers.

The team in enjoyed an active day planting trees alongside several other community organisations, all while looking out towards the Remarkables mountain range on a bluebird day. It doesn’t get much better than that, we reckon!

Previously, the planting site had been covered in a forest of a species of exotic pine trees called wilding pines and work had been undertaken to remove such trees and their seedlings to make way for regenerative native forest.

Our guests are often surprised to hear from their guides about work to eradicate pine trees from Queenstown Basin hillsides, as they are a regular fixture in the Northern Hemisphere, particularly in alpine areas.

The pines were originally introduced to shelter homes, protect livestock, prevent erosion and establish forestry, but what was unforeseen was the effect on native ecosystems - their high-density growth takes sun, nutrients and water away from other plant species, forcing our native flora and fauna out of their natural habitats.

We couldn’t be more proud to be part of the work to protect our precious landscapes and support the long-term goals of the Arrowtown Choppers to end the spread of wilding pines and drive the reintroduction of locally sourced native plants.

A Lifetime collaboration

The 'Arrowtown Choppers' is a collaborative project supported by the Arrowtown local community and local businesses including First Light Travel and New Zealand Trails. The project is a significant part of our strategy as a tourism business to offset carbon and keep New Zealand beautiful. As the forest develops, the carbon captured in the trees and soil will help offset our carbon dioxide emissions. The current plan is to plant and nurture over 100,000 seedlings for the foreseeable future. Volunteers will plant around 5000 trees per year. This collaboration represents a novel approach to reforestation and education, where the indigenous biodiversity of the land will be restored while providing a range of benefits to the community.

Join us on the journey of reducing our environmental footprint.

First Light Travel and our sister company New Zealand Trails acknowledge that we need to reduce our environmental footprint.

You can opt-in and help for as little as $NZ5pp (US$3) - or not, it's ok, we are going to do it anyway. This year we donated $NZ10.000 (that's 3,333 trees) and volunteered a lot of labor - and we intend to do better next and every other year.