Whether it’s adventuring, conservation, management or music making, Queenstown’s Sarah Lyttle’s enjoyed a very varied life — and she’s still only 45.
Also a mother of two girls, 6 and 4, she’s nowadays chief executive of the NZ Nature Fund, securing millions for critical conservation projects.
But she can also be found gigging on the saxophone, to the sound of house music, as ‘SaxyLady’.
Growing up on a Wairarapa farm, she spent a lot of time in nature and went on weekend adventures during her high school years.
Enchanted as an 8-year-old by Lisa Simpson’s sax-playing on The Simpsons, Sarah decided to learn it after first having to master the clarinet for two years.
She attended workshops in Wellington run by jazz maestro, the late Rodger Fox, and played for the Wairarapa Big Band and New Zealand Youth Jazz Orchestra.
Her parents, however, convinced her to attend a hotel management school in New Plymouth, where she did a business management degree.
Her first internship was at Queenstown’s The Heritage in 1999 — her second was in the United States.
Sarah returned to Queenstown and was a duty manager for Lynn McVicar at St Moritz, then worked at the brand-new Sofitel.
Her "big break" was heading up marketing and recruitment for the new Queenstown Resort College — "I basically travelled NZ for four or five years".
She says she got a call to do a mountain bike photo shoot at Lake Hayes’ high-end Bendemeer subdivision, at which developer Alistair Jeffery convinced her to be his asset manager.
"Basically I brought a distressed asset back to life — it was kind of a unique role because it was a bit of everything."
Balancing her active work life, Sarah’s continued to be a hard-out recreationist.
After volunteering for two years in the media team for multi-day adventure race, GODZONE, she competed the next year.
She married fellow adventurer Jeremy Lyttle 10 years ago, fittingly on the Tasman Glacier.
At the end of 2016 they pack-rafted over seven days from their Arthurs Point home to the east coast via the Shotover, Kawarau and Clutha rivers.
Five years later, to celebrate her 41st birthday, Sarah circumnavigated Lake Whakatipu by kayak over four days, telling Mountain Scene "I encourage everyone to dream up a wee local excursion to undertake".
Meantime, she reignited her passion for the sax when hearing Queenstown’s Nigel Hirst playing on the Coronet Peak deck — "I heard the sax penetrating through the mountains, I’ll never forget that moment".
After competitive mountain biking for a few years, she broke her neck on Skyline in 2014 and was told she couldn’t ski or bike for 12 to 18 months.
Her parents sent her sax back to her so she took it up again in the interim.
Subsequently she spent eight years in Peter Doyle’s Queenstown Jazz Orchestra.
Sarah’s now broken out on her own as SaxyLady, performing soul and funk in mostly private gigs, sometimes even jumping on tables.
She says the trajectory of her sax career’s been "crazy", while still admitting to some imposter syndrome.
After entering "mum life" for a stage, she then got into non-profits.
She became GM of local music school, Turn Up the Music, then its chairperson.
Next she took a year’s contract setting up the Three Lakes Cultural Trust.
Out of the blue, almost three years ago she was invited to be chief exec of the NZ Nature Fund, which then-Queenstowner Denis Marshall had rebranded from the original NZ National Parks and Conservation Foundation he’d founded about 20 years earlier.
Before the call, Sarah had decided what she needed in a job — something that got her to Fiordland and the subantarctic islands and connecting with inspiring people.
"I couldn’t have dreamed of a better job," she says, crediting Marshall for being an amazing mentor.
"We’re now in partnership with Department of Conservation, and we’ve got roughly $80million of critical conservation projects we’re working with across NZ.
"It’s about taking people on the journey of the importance of investing in nature."
You can see why she loves her job when she calls her "other office" the great outdoors.
"This isn’t a desk job — it’s a mission to protect what makes Aotearoa unique."
