Our Family

We’re the Covogg family, a half Kiwi, half American family who is lucky enough to call two mountain/lake towns – Queenstown, New Zealand and Truckee, California – home.

I (Adrian, or AD for short) learned to whitewater kayak as a kid. As a teenager I observed how much fun the river guides around me were having, and soon became a river guide myself while still in high school. After graduating from college my adventurous spirit lead me to Canada where I spent a year rafting, kayaking, backpacking, and skiing snow deeper than I ever imagined. I was hooked on adventure travel and spent the next 15 years as a full time seasonal guide traveling to any exotic country that captured my imagination to hike, ski, mountain bike, kayak and raft. I traveled to the US to raft the Grand Canyon in 1995 and spent subsequent summer seasons there working as river guide in Colorado and Idaho before meeting my wife Emily and making California my second home.

I call Emily the brains of the family – she has a fancy Ivy League degree and had been accepted into all the top medical schools in the US when a change of heart and a chance recommendation to try river guide school in California changed her life forever opening up new possibilities around work/life balance and outdoor recreation. In the early days of New Zealand Adventure Guides, Emily was a double entrepreneur: she set up the initial systems for our adventure travel company while also getting her own environmental software venture off the ground, all the while chasing around our then babies/toddlers. Emily now happily is out of the day-to-day of New Zealand Adventure Guides, but is always open to exploring new places in the name of research and development for new trips. 

It’s hard to tell our family’s story without the major chapter that came in 2017, when I was diagnosed with stage IV colon cancer. An eternal optimist, I went into every surgery and chemotherapy treatment that year with a positive attitude and a smile on my face, determined not to let each setback bring me down. I spent the following summer, post cancer treatment, in and out of emergency rooms and hospitals with a myriad of complications and emergency surgeries. All of this only cemented my belief that we are born resilient and it’s up to each of us to decide how we are going to respond to life’s challenges. I’m happy to report that I’ve been in great health since 2019, and 2022 marked five years in remission.

The true bosses of our family, CJ and Zane, would be perfectly happy to read, spend their days playing video games or Dungeon and Dragons with their friends. Unfortunately for them, they were born into the Covogg family so are made to do all sorts of adventures on foot, bikes, skis, rafts, kayaks, sailboats, surfboards and more – my goal is to give them the childhood I would have loved, even if it’s not the one they’d choose! To the boys’ credit, they are great sports, and there are few dads happier or prouder than I am when we are all out in the great outdoors on adventures together. It’s these experiences that inspire me to share our adventures with other families on New Zealand Adventure Guides trips.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so feel free to browse through the photos below of our many family adventures, all in the name of spending time together outdoors and developing helpful, caring and resilient children.

I share this story and these photos because we are a small family business. Having operated trips for years on behalf of large corporations (as what’s called an “inbound tour operator” in the travel industry), I’m thrilled to be offering trips where you can now book directly with New Zealand Adventure Guides. When you book, you are not only choosing an incredible experience for your vacation, you’re also supporting a family working hard to do our best by both our kids and by you, our valued guest.