Mike Mee - Growing up in ‘the best place in the world’

He hails from one of the Wakatipu’s best-known farming and original tourism pioneering families, their family farm now probably the largest expanse of untouched greenbelt and spectacular hill country in the Wakatipu. And that’s the way Mike Mee and his family want it to stay.

Protecting that ‘special’ area and sharing what they can with others has been paramount for Mike, twin sister Liz and their families as they carry on the legacy left by their parents, Deer Park tourism pioneers Frank and Jean Mee.

With Mike managing the process, they released 170ha of their prime Kawarau Falls Station beneath The Remarkables to the QEII Trust for protection from development in 2021.

“It was the right thing to do,” Mike, 68, who grew up on that family station, says. “It’s a special place and we need to look after it. You don’t want housing all through that valley. It’s the gateway from Fiordland and Southland, too precious a place.”

He and wife Bridget also reopened the Mee’s popular Deer Park Heights tourist attraction, first opened in 1970 by his father, Frank, who battled bureaucracy for years to operate the park. It had been closed for 11 years as his parents got older, and Mike says since reopening, the park, with its spectacular 360-degree panorama, has been hugely popular again. “It’s always fully booked the whole time. Asian visitors especially love it,” he says. “That too is such a special place, and we wanted people to be able to go up there and enjoy it again.”

As a kid Mike’s school holiday job was ensuring the animals’ feed containers were always full. “I’d be incredibly bored sitting up there all day.”

“I’d bike into Queenstown on my one speed, aged about 10, from our home off Boyd Road and catch eels off the pier,” he recalls. “Meteor skipper Frank Haworth had a little Vespa parked down by the pier. That did a few trips around town when his boat went out,” Mike grins.

Wide-eyed, he watched Air Force Iroquois helicopters lift hay donated by local farmers from the Queenstown Rec Ground and carry it to stations like Coronet Peak during ‘The Big Snow’ of 1968.

“When the first big four-engine Boeing 747 jet arrived in New Zealand they drew an outline of the footprint on the Rec Ground to show the size, pretty exciting for us kids.”

At John McGlashan boarding school in Dunedin First XV Rugby was big, and he was a prefect, often going hunting at Monowai in the holidays with his Uncle Bob.

After a year’s studies at Lincoln, Mike worked on a Lake Hawea farm, playing rugby for Upper Clutha, and getting into some backcountry skiing and hiking in the mountains.

In 1979 he headed off on his OE, California first before catching a bus to Canada. “I’d planned to work in the building boom in Calgary. I stepped off the bus into howling sleet and snow and thought, no way!” he says. “Then one night in New York terrified this country boy.”

Mike paid $NZ100 to fly to London with Freddie Laker Airlines, working in pubs and driving trucks and limousines, including chauffeuring Qatar’s ruling Thani family and their luggage.

Frank was selling the farm and needed a worker so after a year Mike flew home to the “the best place in the world” after “the best adventure of his life”. “That travel was the best part of my education. It built confidence,” he says.

Frank didn’t sell and by 40, Mike, the experimental adventurer, was at the helm.

“I tried hang-gliding off the Deer Park when aviation rules permitted it, stalling a wing and plummeting into a deer fence.” An attempt to parapente off Skyline Hill also landed him stuck up a tree. “I called out to Carl Selby walking beneath me to get me a ladder. It was Friday night, and he said: ‘You’ve got to be joking. I’m off to the pub!’”

Mike also got into ski touring and climbing in the late 80s, early 90s – Mount Cook’s Tasman Glacier, Mitre Peak and Elie de Beaumont.

Frank got into sailing buying a yacht, and after sailing with his dad Mike won the ‘100-Mile Race’ from Queenstown to Glenorchy, Kingston, and back to Queenstown with Stephen Harvey and Hamish McCrostie.

Around this time, he met Wānaka heliski guide and nurse, Bridget, marrying in 1994 with two kids to follow.

Frank built a holiday house at Jackson’s Bay on the West Coast that year (1994), where they’d go whitebaiting every year, Mike also diving and fishing.

It’s still Mike’s ‘happy place’, along with hunting in Fiordland.

In recent years he and his family have developed a small number of sections at Peninsula Hill in Kelvin Heights.

While there have been many highlights he sees being a good steward of the land he’s in charge of as his most important task. “That QEII Trust covenant was the biggest and best decision I’ve ever made. It’s a legacy,” he says.