Endeavour Inlet is situated at the outer Queen Charlotte Sound and is an area of natural beauty made up of areas of sheltered waterways and a variety of vegetation types, ranging from regenerating forest, lowland podocarp/broadleaved forest and ancient beech and rata trees on its higher slopes.

During the 1880s, a small town grew up in the Inlet around a series of antimony mines. Narrow, horizontal tunnels or “adits” were dug, from which vertical shafts descended deep into the hills. Early miners took the antimony ore on a tramway down the valley to a wharf, from where it was shipped to England to be processed and used for hardening lead and pewter.

The Endeavour Inlet Conservation Trust was established in 2010 to protect and enhance the natural ecosystem and heritage values of the Inlet for the benefit of the community, visitors  and public.

The project provides a sustained conservation effort, coordinating and intensifying efforts already underway by many locals, to ensure the survival and regeneration of the local bush and its threatened inhabitants. One of the key management objectives of the group is to establish a pest control operation to reduce the numbers of possums, stoats, rats, and cats to as close to zero density as is practical.