As some of you may or may not know, the real reason I’m in New Zealand is because it’s winter here and that only means one thing: skiing. Unfortunately, NZ being a small Pacific island the ski culture here isn’t that big. In order to get to the one nordic ski area they have, called the Snow Farm, on Friday some friends and I rented a car and drove 4 hours inland into the mountains and camped on the side of a lake. Keep in mind it is winter here and was below freezing. In order to maximize ski time the next day I scraped my skis using the light of the van headlights on the beach we were camping on, easily the weirdest place I’ve ever waxed skis.
Since I was the only one of my friends going skiing, the next morning I woke up early and took an hour shuttle to the base of an alpine area near the Snow Farm, then hitchhiked up the 13km access road with my skis. I got picked up pretty quick by a shuttle bus coming from another town - if I haven’t it mentioned yet, everyone here is really nice. On the way up we picked up the Venezuelan national ski team, consisting only of a 23-year-old ex-rugby player named Cesar who came close to getting a slot in the 2010 Olympics as a developing country. He’s only been skiing for 3 years, so 2014 looks pretty promising. Also, McDonald's sponsors him - USSA should look into this, way more calories than that Nature Valley crap.
Anyway, once I got to the ski area I found that despite being on the other side of the world there were a fair number of familiar faces. The Koons brothers as well as couple ex-UMPI skier/coaches were there as ski instructors. The first awesome surprise of the day was that a recently graduated UMPI skier offered me a free place to stay and a ride to and from the trails. This sure as hell beat the original plan of hitchhiking back to town, camping out, and then hitching back to the Snow Farm. After getting a quick tour by the Snow Farm's resident NZ Olympian, I waxed up my classic skis and headed out. The conditions were unreal - a pretty good snow pack, and no ice anywhere. I skied on VR 45 and 50 all day with blue sky and would have worn a t-shirt if I had been doing anything but lots of easy skiing.
My second awesome surprise of the day came when I skied around a corner to find the US Nordic team cruising around a loop filming technique. I was wearing the JO bottom spandex and got some pretty good double takes from them. I pretty quickly realized that my technique showed pretty obviously that I had been skiing for a grand total of 5 minutes in the last 4 months and stopped flailing after them.
The training plan for the weekend called for as much volume as I could get in. To make things simple, I figured start out in the morning with 2 hours easy, then take a snack and go out again for as long as I could. Now I wasn’t expecting that much, not having skied in a while and having to deal with some hellacious roller ski conditions, but that first couple hours absolutely kicked my butt. After dragging myself up to the lodge and devouring some peanut butter, jelly, and cheese sandwiches. I admitted my difficulties to one of the ski instructors there. She replied, “You know we’re at about 6,000 feet elevation here?” 6,000 ft. might not be that much for some of you from out West, but for an Easterner who has spent most of the last 2 years living on the coast it made a difference. Feeling some justification for how clunky I was skiing, I went out after lunch and was able to reassemble my technique and start moving around pretty smoothly.
After skiing I helped de-fumigate some very stanky rental boots to earn a seat in the staff van headed into town. Back in town I went out to eat mountains of Indian food with some of the ski instructors. It turns out that the ski season down here corresponds pretty well with our summer vacation and that it’s manageable for a well-qualified skier earn enough to pay for a flight, rent, and food. Needless to say, I talked with the owners on Sunday and prospects look pretty good for a 2011 summer on snow.
The next day was pretty much the same: more awesome conditions, skiing with/getting passed by the USST. I managed to get in a little over 8 hours of skiing between the two days. Here are some pictures of the ski area. Sorry no pictures with/of the US team - I was too ashamed about my technique to ask them, but I’ll try next weekend.
The ski school instructors let me borrow an iron to travel wax skis. As I was waxing in the empty wax room, I looked over and noticed a bunch of nice skis leaning against the wall. Upon reading the names on the skis I came to realize that I was alone in a room with a least one pair of skis from most of the USST members. What’s more is that each pair of skis had a pair of ski ties with their first name then NZ written on it. Did I mention that I was completely alone with 4 perfectly good ski ties without my name on them in the next room over? After a long and ethically tumultuous debate in my head, I grudgingly decided against acquiring a nearly complete set of USST ski ties in one go. I saw kids fight over a single Southam ski tie at JOs. The main reason I left them was karma. I still needed to hitchhike 50 miles back to town that afternoon with a ski bag, and my legs were already fried from skiing all day which made walking any extended part of that very undesirable. I’d like to think that I made the right choice. Between the 3 times I hitchhiked this trip, I only got passed by 4 cars that didn’t pick me up, and never waited longer than 5 minutes for a ride - that’s also with a ski bag which won’t fit into a lot of the tiny cars they have here. I ended up getting back to where my friends were going to pick me up an hour early and took probably the most scenic nap on the side of the road imaginable.
It was a pretty awesome trip to say the least, and I should be able to go back most weekends through mid-September.
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