Richard Westenra

The following is the fourth 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.

As I’m writing this, it’s early August, and I’m relaxing in the main lodge at Temple Basin with a well-earned beer. I am exhausted. I’ve spent more time doing volunteer work up here than I have skiing. Today I spent all day running the goodslift, and didn’t get a chance to ski. Last Thursday and Friday I worked from dawn ‘til midnight doing two food runs back to back, totalling about eleven hours of driving (in the Temple truck and goodslift), five tons of food and alcohol delivered, and two truck breakdowns.

I am having the time of my life.

I’ve been keeping track of my days on the snow using the ‘Snowbook’ application on Facebook, and I’ll let them tell the story of my days on the snow by pasting them below. Suffice to say that it’s been rockin’. Instead, I’ll try to summarise of what’s been going on off the snow.

Note: At this point I stopped writing – apparently I got distracted by something. The rest of this entry was written in mid October.

August was dominated by Temple Basin weekend events and warm summery weather. Nearly every weekend featured a special party or competition, which meant that I was frequently bringing up huge loads of food and alcohol in the Temple truck. The upside of all this work was that I got to spend a lot of time on the mountain – the downside was that a lot of it was spent stuck in the goodslift shed.
Possibly due to the El Niño climate pattern, this was the warmest August since records began 155 years ago. Bluebird days were almost unbearably hot unless spent skiing in a t-shirt, and any precipitation arrived as rain to destroy the already-suffering snowpack. As a result, during much of August and early September we felt like we were watching the snowpack die.

In mid-August a cold went round the TB staff, exacerbated by our close living conditions. I felt the first effects as I drove down from the mountain with Jo, Aoife and Claire, and was forced to spend the next week laying low in Christchurch while I recovered. On my return to the Basin I found that the rest of the staff had suffered the same thing – must’ve been a pretty crappy week on the hill.

Day #10 – Temple Basin – 1st August 2009

A one-day break between storm-fronts allowed a mellow day’s skiing in fine conditions and 7cm of fresh snow, perfect for the afternoon of the 80s Party. Due to the previous day’s slush-skiing and overnight freeze, Temple tow had horrible and unpredictable snow conditions, consisting mainly of fresh dry dust on icey chunks. A couple of these runs left me sore and frustrated, so I returned to the lodge to let my feet rest and get my stoke back. After a short time browsing ski mags, I headed over the Cassidy and managed to find exactly what I’d been looking for all along – fresh, beautiful, untracked snow with barely a chunky spot in sight. Cue back-to-back shallow pow runs, as I raced to track out Cassidy before the student hoardes arrived, along with about a dozen others who’d discovered the goods on Cassidy. I also managed my first proper Upper Bill’s run in the afternoon, although I can’t remember a thing about my line or who I was with.

Day #11 – Temple Basin – 8th August 2009

Fire & Ice Weekend! An epic bluebird day. By mid-morning Temple tow was riding like a sweet groomed run, after a few sunny days and heaps of punters tracking it out. The flat and (relatively) forgiving snow made it perfect for hucking the numerous small features dotting the run, and the huge Fire & Ice crew got stuck into it. By the afternoon Downhill and Bill’s were looking sick, so we headed over that way and got a few good runs on the upper tow before hiking the Elevator chute and dropping through Upper Bills with Cam, Helen, Liv, Erin, and some other girl whose name I forget. That evening was the Fire & Ice weekend, about which little need be said save that it was awesome. The crew riding Temple tow under the night lights was huge – so much so that the tow queue was at least 5 minutes long and snaked up to the hill, unprecedented for Temple tow.

Day #12 – Temple Basin – 9th August 2009

Snow and weather conditions: see previous snow day – same applies. Sunday’s skiing was just as sweet as the previous day’s, and also included a fun Upper Bills trip (with Brian, Josh and Daniel) just prior to lunchtime, dropping through the laundry chute just in time for a feed. At the end of the day Brian and I embarked upon the Grand Traverse from the top of the Elevator Chute, across the top of Upper Bills (just under B’limit) to reach a point just short of Cassidy peak at sunset, culminating in my longest Temple Basin run to date – 10 minutes from the peak to the bottom of Temple tow (including the Cassidy bridge crossing on skis). Unfortunately I was suffering from loose boots (having had my boot padding expand beyond the limit of their ratchets – exacerbated by the two hour hike/traverse – which has subsequently been fixed with a ratchet re-drilling) which caused my skiing to be more than a little sketchy. Compounding my problems were the heavy sun-affected snow and an advancing blister from the hike, however I managed to hold it together and make the descent without bailing nor losing the ear-to-ear grin from my face.

Day #13 – Mt Hutt – 16th August 2009

The parents came down for the weekend and shouted me a day at Hutt so they could take it easy on the chairlifts.
Was sunny-ish this morning, then the low cloud came in and brought things to a standstill with 10 metre visibility that sent the punters scattering to their cars. Reminded me of skiing at Ruapehu as a kid: in the North Island that kind of weather is just your standard morning tea.

The snow was just as you’d expect from two weeks of warm temps and rain. Hard in the morning, slushy in the afternoon. Broadway was well-polished and precluded getting a solid edge in the morning, but not bad after lunch.

Bring on a cold snap already dammit! This warm precipitation isn’t doing anyone any favours. Usually in winter every cloud has a silver lining because you know that it’s bringing snow, but this week the crappy weather is just, well, crap.

Day #14 – Temple Basin – 21st August 2009

Weather: bluebird, no wind, mint.
Snow conditions: What do you expect? It’s been sunny/rainy for 3 weeks. The snowpack has been substantially reduced. The good news is that it’s still very ridable. There are rocks on trail, but not a whole lot. Nothing is worth skiing before lunchtime, but there’s lots of sick spots in the afternoon. Temple tow is no fun at all to ride, kinda like skiing slippery gravel/marbles. Cassidy is heaps of fun once it warms up, slushy and forgiving. I spent the early afternoon practising my switch skiing on Cassidy, love it over there.
Downhill is surprisingly fun in the afternoon. Ski patrol were describing the snow as ‘cheesy’ – in a good way. Bill’s still has a bit of fresh from Tuesday’s storm, kinda like dust on crust. Apparantly Cassidy peak after the grand traverse was mind-blowing, one of the Aussies described it as the best run of his life so make of that what you will.

Freeride competition tommorrow, sweet!

Day #15 – Temple Basin – 22nd August 2009

Freeride Competition! Downhill Basin (the originally intended site for the comp) was out because there wasn’t enough snow to allow a good line, so the comp was moved to the top of Upper Bills. Everyone got one run to show their stuff. We had earlier been advised against ‘hucking our meat’ off big drops if we were unsure about sticking the landing, and that the judging would instead focus on aggressive, fluid, controlled riding. With that in mind I chose a mellow line with no airs, and a quick dodge between some rocks at the start. I didn’t see my entire score card, but from what I did see I could tell that I had done pretty much as expected – a good score for control but a poor score for my line. I ended up coming 14th (out of about 20), and got a spot prize of a T-shirt, so I was stoked with that.
The snow conditions were the same as the previous day – solar-affected, slushy in the sun and dusty/crusty in the shade. Was pretty sunny, but with some high cloud.

Day #16 – Temple Basin – 23rd August 2009

Rainy and horrible. It snowed a little, which improved Temple tow a little, but mainly it sucked. I went out for a few turns, found it lame, came back inside.

Day #17 – Temple Basin – 24th August 2009

Day skiing was lame, but night skiing was actually pretty cool. A fair bit of rain all day, we are watching the ski field die.

Day #18 – Broken River – 28th August 2009

Planned a day at Mt Olympus with Kate, but in the morning it was on hold, so we opted for Cragieburn instead, which was also on hold but at least has a backup in BR. We arrived at Cragieburn to find it closed for the day, so we headed round the corner to BR.

Weather was partly cloudy with strong winds in the morning, changing suddenly to heavy snowfall (with more strong winds) in the afternoon.
A fair bit of new snow on the ground from the last 24 hours’ snowfall, but it had a weird consistency. Looked fairly dryish, but was incredibly draggy and not exactly exciting to slide over. Probably caused by the rain or temperature. The only run open on the field was the top half of the access tow (Rugby), but that got old pretty quickly, especially with lame snow and increasingly lame conditions, so we left after a couple of hours and headed to Castle Hill to frollick in the rock gardens (where we were right on the edge of the storm boundary, with blue skies and sunshine but rain blowing at us from across the divide).
When I got home I noticed that I had lost one of my car’s hub caps. However, all was not lost, as a later post shall reveal…

Day #19 – Cragieburn – 31st August 2009

This was the first of a 3 day trip living in the car. The original plan was to try to make it to Cragieburn, Cheeseman and Mt Olympus and thus finish off the Selwyn fields that I hadn’t yet visited. Weather looked like it’d be touch and go, but I cruised up to Cragieburn shortly before lunchtime and it was open except for the top tow, which was closed due to high winds.

I bumped into Ben Pritchard from TB (he had judged the Gnomes Freeride Comp the previous week) in the parking lot as I was cooking up a little lunch, and we did a bit of riding together during the day. There was a fair amount of fresh snow on the ground, but the strong winds had redistributed it so that ridges and exposed points were extremely icy. The upshot of this was that the basins, gullies and chutes were filled to the brim with powdery goodness, and any ski tracks were quickly erased by the gale-force winds. Hooray, unlimited freshies!

At the end of the day I headed down to camp at the bottom of the Broken River access road. There were a few other campers around, and I managed to build up a bit of a picture of what was going on in the area from talking to them about where they’d skied that day – who needs a snow report when you’ve got the bush telegraph?

Sleeping in the car was fine, albeit a little cramped and cold. The new car battery setup only managed to power my laptop for an hour unfortunately, meaning that I needed to run the engine for a bit to allow me to finish my Deadwood episodes.