Billionaire gifting bike park to NZ

Secretive American-born billionaire Ken Dart plans to donate the popular and sprawling Wairoa Gorge Bike Park to the Crown.

It will be managed by the Department of Conservation, with public access run through the Nelson Mountain Bike Club (NMTBC).

He has also sold South Canterbury’s 4046-hectare Lilydale Station, which includes the land used by Fox Peak Ski Field, to local conservationists.

The 860-hectare Wairoa Gorge will be donated to the Crown by the end of the year, to be managed as a conservation reserve. Dart bought the land in 2010 through his company RHL Holdings, and had more than 70 kilometres of mountainbike trails built through the mixed native beech and plantation pine forest.

RHL Holdings spent about $19 million developing the mountainbiking infrastructure on the site.

Since 2016, the Nelson Mountain Bike Club has had a rent-free lease agreement RHL Holdings, allowing the public to access the trails during organised shuttle days. It can currently only be ridden using the paid shuttle service, something the club plans to look at in the future.

Before 2016, the public had been unable to access the site.

RHL director Paul Dorrance said it was always intended that the park would be gifted to the community.

He said NMTBC’s lease had been a trial to see how well it would work, and as the club had been an excellent manager of the park, it was the right time to donate it.

There was ‘‘quite a bit’’ still to be done to transfer the land to the Crown, he said, but RHL was confident it would get there.

Dorrance said the arrangement was ‘‘unique’’, as reserves were usually just land, but this one had all the mountainbiking infrastructure on it.

‘‘It’s quite a big thing for DOC to take on. I don’t think it could, which is why we’ve developed this very unique partnership whereby the club . . . will manage and grow that park of it, and DOC will manage the conservation estate.’’

Nelson Mountain Bike Club spokesman Paul Jennings said Dart’s gift would help to establish Nelson as ‘‘one of the world’s leading destinations for downhill mountainbiking’’.

He said the club knew there were opportunities to do more, and would look at having guide services, adjusting the minimum age, and making the park appeal to a wider range of people. The club could now start planning in terms of the next 20 to 50 years.

Jennings said there was little doubt Wairoa was the best hand-

built bike park in the world, so it gave the top of the south a real point of difference that it had not capitalised on yet. He said there was a ‘‘real opportunity to make this a thing that people around the world know about and have on their bucket list’’.

DOC northern South Island operations director Roy Grose said Wairoa was an area of ‘‘outstanding natural beauty’’.

Lilydale Station 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 native plants in the area, he said.