Te Anau couple buy Lilydale
Secretive American-born billionaire Ken Dart has sold South Canterbury’s 4046-hectare Lilydale Station to local conservationists.
He will also donate the popular Wairoa Gorge Bike Park, near Nelson, to the Crown. It will be managed by the Department of Conservation and made accessible to the public through the Nelson Mountain Bike Club.
Lilydale Station, which includes skifield Fox Peak, was sold to farmers and conservationists Warrick and Wendy Day, of Te Anau. It was previously owned by Dart’s company RHL (Lilydale), which bought it for $3.5 million in 2013.
Warrick Day said they had bought the area, for a confidential price, to ‘‘develop the conservation aspect of it’’.
‘‘It’s just for enhancing the vegetation and trying to suppress the weed problems.’’
He said everything would remain the same – the skifield would be able to continue to operate, the limited grazing lease on some farmland would remain ‘‘because of the fire risk’’, and a hunting licence would be retained. Day said the direction they planned to take the property matched what RHL had been doing. RHL had done a good job of regenerating the natives in the area, he said. The property has issues with invasive broom, gorse and grey willow.
Day said the land would remain private, and he hoped to live on the property one day.
Lilydale is about two hours drive south of Christchurch and has been leased since 1983 during winter months to Fox Peak Ski Field, paying a peppercorn rent of just $1 a year with rights of renewal until 2038.
The property also has an international reputation for game hunting, with tahr easy to find on the high tussock grasslands, along with red and fallow deer, chamois, pigs and wallaby.
It also has a poled walkway of about 3.8km for trampers, which links two sections of DOC land.
Dart, a passionate mountainbiker, had intended to build a world-class mountain bike park on the land.
The 860-hectare Wairoa Gorge will be donated to the Crown by the end of the year. Dart bought the land in 2010 and had more than 70km of mountain bike trails built through the mixed native beech and plantation pine forest.
Since 2016, the Nelson Mountain Bike Club has had a rent-free lease agreement with Dart’s RHL Holdings allowing the public to access the world-class trails at its organised shuttle days.
Before then, the public had been unable to access the site.
RHL manager Pete Fyfe said Wairoa was a special place to Dart, for both the physical beauty of the land and the work ethic and spirit of those that built the tracks.
Nelson Mountain Bike Club spokesman Paul Jennings said Dart’s gift would help establish Nelson as ‘‘one of the world’s leading destinations for downhill mountainbiking’’.
DOC Northern South Island operations director Roy Grose said Wairoa was an area of ‘‘outstanding natural beauty’’.
Dart’s wealth is estimated at more than US$6 billion, from global investments in distressed debt and luxury property, plus a family business making polystyrene cups. He is based in the Cayman Islands.