He embodied the best of the Kiwi spirit, devoting a huge range of practical skills for the benefit of the community and to inspire all those who came to Coromandel to immerse themselves in its beauty and environment.
As a member of the trio of trustees on the Spirit of Coromandel Trust - alongside great friend and fellow adventurer Andy Reid and wife Rita - he led a dedicated following of athletes including rugby great Richie McCaw, on a journey inspired by the fresh sea and mountain air of the Coromandel.
For more than 20 years, the Spirit of Coromandel Trust used funds raised from its events to send Coromandel youngsters on adventure courses that changed their lives for the better.
Keith knew the importance of 'feeling alive' in nature, and spent his life helping others do the same.
It is with thanks to Keith, Rita and Andy Reid's love of the outdoors that athletes - and the Coromandel communities that benefited from their fundraising - had three iconic events including the K2 Road Cycle Classic, the ARC Adventure Race and the Great Kauri Run.
Keith and Andy hiked the length and breadth of the peninsula, finding marvellous and scary challenges for Adventure Races Coromandel (ARC events), involving cliff-faces, mine shafts, tunnels, eels and fast water, in the process developing deep ties and relationships with farmers, Maori communities and landowners throughout.
Keith would regularly take the trust's marquee to local marae and erect it single-handedly for tangi.
Among the beneficiaries of Keith's wisdom and kindness were generations of souls who had fallen foul of the law who he tirelessly supervised doing their community work.
The Trust's K2 Road Cycle Classic is possibly the toughest one-day cycle challenge in the Southern Hemisphere, taking in four stages and starting and finishing at a different town each time and sending four young people from the Coromandel to outdoor adventure courses with the fundraising.
The K2 cycle race requires more than 150 volunteers and the trust always found them - a testament to Keith, Rita and Andy's organisational and leadership skills, and Keith's wicked sense of humour.
The Great Cranleigh Kauri Run took athletes over multiple stream crossings into the hills behind Colville, connecting with tracks to Coromandel Town in a distance of 32km.
Each participant's entry ensured the planting of a kauri tree - another of Keith's passions. Keith was a trustee on the Coromandel Kauri Dieback Forum and his lifelong volunteering resulted in a forest of these taonga being planted.
Keith's passion for protecting the environment, particularly the kauri forests that were so devastatingly felled in the 19th and 20th Centuries, raised awareness of the threat to kauri from dieback disease, caused by the spread of infected soil into the forest.
A man of action and not words, he was the Coromandel Town co-ordinator for Kauri 2000, which evolved out of a project to mark the new millennium by planting 2000 kauri, and more than 55,000 kauri have been planted on the Coromandel Peninsula since then.
On the Kauri Run, every participant is given a kauri seedling to plant along the trail, and there are several thousand now in the ground. His vision was to plant 10,000 trees and to create an avenue of Kauri all the way from Waikawau to Coromandel Town.
He achieved this - more than 14,000 kauri are planted thanks to the trust.
He was a devoted husband to Rita, who he married in May 1975, the day before his birthday so he'd have no chance of forgetting their wedding anniversary.
Rita was similarly inspired by her love of nature and they had four children: Elliot, Carne, Cara and Riana.
Always wanting to "give something back" to the community, profits from the events were used to create an outdoor activity centre in their own backyard - the Coromandel Bike
Park which is a great asset to Coromandel Town.
Keith's biggest dream was to inspire and mobilise the next generation of Kiwi leaders, adventurers and environmentalists with an outdoor pursuits centre on the peninsula.
Many tramp the peninsula's tracks without knowing they were opened up, literally, by Keith - his machete, chainsaw and the teams he assembled. The new bike park and pump track at Coromandel are a lasting legacy to his work and life.
