Waste-free parties
By MATTHEW MCKEW
From the ashes can rise a phoenix and like so many in these difficult times, three young entrepreneurs are forging a new business from the Covid rubble the difference being, they intend to clean up after themselves.
Kickboxer and DJ Charlie Charalambides says when the pandemic cleared Queenstown’s busy schedule, it opened up venues to budding promoters like himself to book spaces previously unavailable.
‘‘The first time I ever went up the Skyline gondola, the first thing I thought was that it would be an amazing place to have a party.’’
And when Covid put paid to international conferences, that’s exactly what he and his business partners Alejandro Camhi and Sebastian Dettmann did.
Mountain Scene
July 5, 2021
By GUY WILLIAMS
Queenstown’s power couple of conservation, Barbara and Neill Simpson (above), have been bestowed with Rotary’s highest honour.
The founders of the Wakatipu Reforestation Trust were made Paul Harris Fellows by the club’s resort branch at its ‘change-over night’ at Bazaar restaurant late last month.
The fellowships recognised their contribution over 40 years to ecology, botany and environmental education in the Whakatipu Basin and beyond.
The club also presented Hans Arnestedt and Helen and Tom McPhail with certificates of appreciation for their voluntary work for the trust, and made a $1000 donation.
Barbara says the fellowships were ‘‘very unexpected’’, and she was surprised at how much information the club unearthed about the many different projects they had been involved with over the years.
Mountain Scene
April 18, 2021
By GUY WILLIAMS
A volunteer army from Queenstown Primary School is giving KAPOW some extra punch.
The school approached the Wakatipu Reforestation Trust last year asking if it needed students to help with one of its native planting projects.
The trust suggested Keeping Arthurs Point’s Original Wildlife (KAPOW), an informal group that’s been restoring and replanting in the Morningstar Reserve since 2018.
The project’s now under way with 140 kids visiting the Department of Conservation reserve
last week to get their hands dirty removing broom and other weeds, spreading mulch, and planting their own shrub or tree.
Mountain Scene
April 9, 2021
By GUY WILLIAMS
The Wakatipu Reforestation Trust will celebrate a major milestone this weekend when its 50,000th native plant goes into the ground.
The moment will come tomorrow morning at Whitechapel Reserve, near Arrow Junction, where the trust’s holding the first of four planting days this autumn.
Operations manager Karen O’Donahoo says the trust and its volunteers have been planting natives throughout the Wakatipu Basin since 2015, and the milestone demonstrates that “from little things, big things grow”.
‘‘We’re restoring biodiversity to areas of public land that were not so long ago neglected and infested with invasive weeds,’’ O’Donahoo says.