Jane Burmester - Burmester Realty

04/08/2026

03/08/2026

🛌 2 🛀 1 🚘 1
📍 1/7 Gerald Stokes Ave, Helensville, Auckland

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03/08/2026

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31/07/2026

🛌 4 🛀 3 🚘 2
📍 9 Pukemarino Road, Waimauku, Auckland

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30/07/2026

🛌 5 🛀 2 🚘 2
📍 1088 S Head Rd, South Head, Auckland

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29/07/2026

Happy Vendors is what we strive for here at Burmester Realty

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29/07/2026

Looking for your next home? Make sure you meet up with Jane Burmester - Burmester Realty Lesley Garriock - Burmester Realty and Danielle Davies - Burmester Realty this weekend at their open homes!

29/07/2026

He gave up a fortune to save a wilderness. She gave up everything else to finish what he started.

In the 1960s, Doug Tompkins was already a legend. He co-founded The North Face. He built Esprit into a fashion empire. He had money, fame, and every comfort that came with it.

Then one day, he walked away from all of it.

He sold his shares. He left the boardrooms behind. And he flew to Patagonia, one of the last truly wild places left on Earth, with a plan that sounded insane to everyone who knew him.

He wanted to buy land. Not to build on it. Not to develop it. But to give it back to the wild, forever.

People called him crazy. A rich man's fantasy. A midlife crisis with a bigger budget.

But then he met Kristine.

Kristine McDivitt was the CEO of Patagonia, the outdoor company, tough, sharp, and just as in love with wild places as he was. When they married, they didn't just build a life together. They built a mission.

Acre by acre, they bought up remote, breathtaking land across Chile and Argentina. Land threatened by logging, mining, and development. Land that held glaciers, forests, and rivers that had never known a fence.

Then came the tragedy that would test everything.

In 2015, Doug was kayaking with friends on a lake in Patagonia when the weather turned violent. His kayak capsized in freezing water. He didn't survive.

Kristine was left to carry a dream that was only half finished.

She could have stopped. No one would have blamed her. Instead, she kept going, harder than before.

She spent years fighting bureaucracy, skeptical governments, and heartbreak, pushing to turn their private land into permanent, protected national parks.

And she won.

Today, millions of acres across Chile and Argentina are protected forever, thanks to two people who believed wilderness was worth more than any fortune. Parks that will outlive every person reading this post.

Their story is now told in the documentary "Wild Life" by Jimmy Chin and Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi, the same filmmakers behind "Free Solo."

It's not just a love story. It's proof that one couple, with enough conviction, can reshape a continent's future.

Would you have made the same choice Doug did? Walk away from wealth for wilderness?

Tell us in the comments.

📌 Follow Nepal Mount Everest for more stories of adventurers who gave everything to the mountains and the wild.



**Sources:**
- National Geographic / "Wild Life" documentary press materials (Jimmy Chin & Elizabeth Chai Vasarhelyi)
- Tompkins Conservation official history