April 24 Tree Planting Arrowtown

The 8th of April 2024 marked another successful tree planting day, as part of our Carbon Offsetting efforts at First Light Travel. Once again we joined in to support the Arrowtown Community (and the Arrowtown Choppers) with their planting day, and planted an impressive total of 3,000 seedling beech trees. With over 150 enthusiastic volunteers from the local community, the task was completed in just over three hours. It was heartening to see so many happy faces coming down the hill afterward.

7th Beech Party - Tree Planting in April (Planting Beech Tree's)

Over the years, the Arrowtown Choppers have planted a total of 17,000 trees, and the number of volunteers remains high, making a significant impact on the environment!

A big shout out to Postmasters Kitchen + Bar for organizing the BBQ and refreshments, Fergburger Ltd and Arrowtown Bakery for the food, and Arrowtown Wine Store, The Winery - Arrowtown, and Four Square Arrowtown for the beverages. Special thanks to Patagonia Chocolates and The Remarkable Sweet Shop for providing treats for the kids, which they absolutely loved, and to the incredible BBQ volunteers.

The Arrowtown Choppers mission is to help replant the area above Arrowtown with native Beech, Ribbonwood, and Totara trees to enhance the biodiversity of the region.

This dedicated volunteer group, play a crucial role in the eradication of wilding conifers and native revegetation work around Arrowtown.

Our native trees aren’t quite as quick growing as some introduced forestry species. That means they don’t store carbon quite as quickly. But their slow growth is more than made up for in their continued accumulation of carbon over a long lifespan and the fact that they stay in the ground rather than being harvested and returning carbon to the atmosphere.

Native trees like to grow close together, so we can pack a lot of them into a small space and planting natives has a lot of co-benefits. They are adapted to our environment and they support other species of native flora and fauna to flourish.

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. Our carbon measurement and offset program to date has allowed us to plant over 3000 native beach trees.

First Light Travel is the Major Sponsor of the Arrowtown Community Nursery - ensuring that we can supply beech seedlings with the highest chance of survival due to local acclimitisation. New Zealand Trails contributes financially to the Arrowtown Choppers who carry out planting and removal of wilding pines.