Richard Westenra

The following is the second part of my Great Winter Roadtrip series. I’ve decided to write these as a complete chronicle of my ski season, like an online road diary. I’m gonna include nearly everything I remember at the time of writing, publish it, and leave serious editing for later. If that turns this blog into an exhausting ramble then so be it – at least I’ll have something to remind myself of what I got up to in the winter of 2009. If you find it an interesting read, great. If not, too bad – go check out TV Tropes or something.

I’ve been pretty slack about updating these, oops! Time to post a series of updates in a hurry – bear with me. I’m gonna rely on my updates from the facebook ‘snow day’ application for the bulk of my posts, as they contain the important recollections about what I got up to during the actual skiing, along with snow and weather conditions.

I got one day’s skiing in both May and June respectively. The ski season hadn’t officially opened yet, but winter wasn’t listening and let loose a massive set of storms in early May, covering the Alps in snow. When there’s snow on the ground but the tows ain’t running, you go hiking, which is exactly what I did:

Day #1 – Mt Cheeseman – 10th May 2009

It had been puking for a few days and a foot or so of snow had fallen during the last week, so ‘brighton pumps’ (Alan) and ‘SnowHunta’ (Ryan) from the Snow.co.nz forum organised a daytrip up to the mountains to check out the conditions and get a few turns in. We drove up to the skifield gate and hiked/snowshoed for 45mins to get to the lodge. There were a fair number of skifield staff/club members around preparing for the season, as well as a couple of ski-tourers with skins. From the lodge we hiked another 15mins or so to get a wee 30second run in. After that we build a small kicker, hiked it and took a few photos, before skiing back down to the car. There were heaps of rocks around; my new Volkl Gotamas (which were being used for the first time) were pretty scratched up, but nothing too major. Ryan’s snowboard edge took a pretty big pounding though.
On the whole a good day out – nothing to compare to a good run mid-season, but fun all the same – plus I beat my previous record (Queen’s Birthday Weekend) for earliest turns of the season by 2 or 3 weeks. Bring on the season!

Snow conditions: about a foot at lodge altitude, but little base and lots of rocks. The snow was very dry, light and fluffy, especially for NZ conditions.

Weather: poor. Subzero winds, poor visibility, light snow, overcast. We got one small window of almost-sun, which was cool while it lasted.

Day #2 – Temple Basin – 1st June 2009

Queen’s Birthday Weekend! Epic 3 days at TB. Good amount of work done, fantastic weather Saturday and Monday (with a good hearty storm and 10cm of snow on Sunday), and a great crew. Everyone was buzzing all weekend, the vibe was great. The previous couple of weeks’ storms had delivered about a foot of stable base with a breakable crust, and Sunday delivered an extra few cm’s of windblown fluff on top. Tows weren’t running yet but I got about 3 runs in Downhill Basin. There were quite a few of us hiking up the tow line, we managed to pretty impressively track out the non-rocky areas considering that we were all hiking/snowshoeing/skinning.

Bring on opening day.