Shutting it Down

At the moment, the stars are clearly visible in the sky overhead despite an evening of on-and-off rain here in town. Looking towards Treble Cone from my house, on the other hand, the view is quite a bit different. There is a massive storm coming, as you can see from the weather chart above, and it is due to hit us by midnight and to be at full strength by the early morning hours. It’s unclear at what elevation the precipitation will fall as snow, but the likely scenario is that as the front passes over TC, the snow line will continue to drop and that by the end of it we’ll get the big dump of the white fluff we’ve been craving. It could be serious, it could be deep, and it most certainly will be welcome.

Among the phenomena here in New Zealand that are totally foreign to visitors from North America is that during very severe storms the ski resorts can actually shut down. It’s due in part to the fact that the resorts are all perched high in alpine terrain above the tree line, and that they are susceptible to both very strong winds which make lifts unsafe and to avalanche danger. This is certainly true of Treble Cone. Add to that the fact that the road leading up to the resort is a bit nutty – the resort “base” is actually more than halfway up the mountain – and one easily can understand why closed days happen.

The real problem with the possibility of the mountain closing is that it exposes some very funny superstitiousness among the staff and our loyal local following. If for some reason the storm is not big enough to close the resort, several people will be blamed for jinxing us – either they were actively predicting a closed day, vocally hoping for a closed day, preparing our business for a closed day, or generally prognosticating as though a closed day was a fait accompli. Don’t misunderstand what is going on here: it is not that the resort staff does not want to work tomorrow, it is simply that we’d gladly sacrifice a day of work if it means getting to ski in some serious powder the day following.

Those of us who do not want to appear superstitious tend to lean heavily on the oddly detailed weather forecasting models here, but I think we nod to superstition anyway. So, my alarm clock is set for the morning, I made plans for the workday tomorrow, and I am not going to burn the midnight oil in anticipation of being able to sleep late. But, my fingers are crossed, in spirit if not reality, and I may take credit for the quality of my snow dance if we do in fact get hammered. In the meantime, I’ll obsess about the forecasts a bit and try to sleep through the eager anticipation of the powder day to come.

Fire in the Sky

Today was a very busy day at Treble Cone. Normally, the last two weeks of July are exceptionally slow - they are probably the least busy weeks of the winter season here on the South Island of New Zealand. Wisely, our resort scheduled several large and notable events during this time, so starting early this morning there was a great buzz about the place. Young alpine racers and their families were arriving by the van-load for a big 'inter-field' race, with the kids resplendent in their high-tech resort ski team uniforms and the number and variety of foreign language accents on the coaches remarkable for this tucked-away corner of the world. In addition, the Summit Saddle Freeride Challenge was a big draw for big mountain skiers and 'wannabe' big mountain skiers from far and wide. The event was a qualifier for the NZ Open North Face Big Mountain Championships, a major stop on the international big mountain skiing circuit, so the fat ski, stickered-helmet, go-big-or-go-home ski subculture was in full flower. It was terrific to have so wide a variety of people out and about, and it lent TC a festival atmosphere.

The best thing about the day, however, was that despite all of the people, all of the energy surrounding the competitions, the biggest buzz of the day and the thing that drew the most attention from the widest variety of people was the sunrise. Each day in the first half of the season I get to see the sunrise while at Treble Cone. It's nearly always beautiful, it's frequently shockingly beautiful, and occasionally it'll stop even the most jaded mountain dweller in their tracks, mouth agape and cameras in action. This was such a morning. Race coaches from all over the world, new school freeriders, spoiled bratty kids on holiday, hardscrabble local folk, itinerant ski and snowboard pros, barristas, patrollers and lifites all seemed to take a moment and just watch Mother Nature's pyrotechnic introduction to the day. It's hard to convey what it's like to work in this environment each and every day for a season. Even the best photos can't quite give the feeling of the time and place, but they may give you some inkling of just how gorgeous it can be. So I hope you enjoy these photos and, if you don't mind, I hope they help you daydream a bit about life in the mountains.

Well Insulated

"Hold on a minute," I said to a friend from home on the phone recently, "I'm going to move into a room with heat." I then walked from my bedroom and into the great room of the house I'm renting with friends here in Wanaka, New Zealand for the Southern Winter, closing the door to the great room behind me. I then giggled a bit, having to explain that yes, there is only one room in our relatively new house that's heated and that it's a rarity that we're able to rent a new house with double-glazed windows, a heat retaining tile roof, insulation, and a "heat pump" in the great room – a heat pump being a wall-mounted electricity-powered forced-air heater.

In my first season here in Wanaka, back in 2007, I shared a house that was not insulated, was built of cinder block, had single pane windows that were less air tight than my backpacking tent, had a fireplace with no flew that was very effective at sucking all the heat out of the house and sending it up the chimney, and that was the coldest building in which I've ever spent time. It would have been a good place to train for life inside a remote mountain artillery battery in wartime. My running joke was that I'd brought thermal long underwear for skiing but only wore it when I went to sleep at night. It was a classic Kiwi "batch" – a bungalow-like summer vacation home typical of Wanaka before the boom in winter sports resorts here began a few decades ago. The best thing I can say about that old house was that it would have been terrific near a beach in a tropical climate.

In defense of the Kiwis, Wanaka was for most of its history a summer resort town, so there was no need to build homes that could comfortably house people in the cold winter of the Southern Alps. In addition, New Zealand is after all a remote island very far south, far from just about everything and with the costs of construction goods that one would expect from its location. And the Kiwis are justly proud of their hard-scrabble, independent-minded, self-sufficiency - it's part of what I enjoy about their company and their nation. Still, it doesn't quite fully explain why it is that despite exorbitantly expensive electricity and a tough climate, Kiwis insist on building inefficient homes that are uncomfortable to inhabit. For crying out loud, I had dinner at a friend's quite modern home last night and pulled some olive oil out of her pantry that was frozen! I mean seriously, her kitchen was so cold that her olive oil froze on the shelf, and that was in a nice house. I wish I were making this up.

So what's an itinerant ski pro to do? How do we keep warm on those cold winter nights with the wind howling as the storms come in off the cold ocean? How can we find a respite from the long days outdoors? Well, truthfully, there are two options. The first is to spend lots of time in the pubs, which generally have roaring fireplaces and all kinds of drinks for sale that can act as vasodilators, warming our hearts and our bodies, steeling our nerves for a night in the igloo. The second is what is referred to here as an 'electric blanket'. An electric blanket here in NZ is not actually a blanket, rather it's a bed pad that goes underneath one's sheets and has an electric coil running through it. Mine has three settings on it – I refer to them as lukewarm, cozy, and pan roast. I typically turn it on the medium setting a few minutes before climbing into bed for the night. Occasionally, I fall asleep fast enough that I don't turn it off until I wake up in the middle of the night severely dehydrated, sweaty, and short only some garlic and rosemary to complete the recipe. Pan seared flannel wrapped roasted Russ. Throw in a goggle tan and an oddly pale mid-section, and I'd scare any creature who happened upon me as I splash cold water on my face at 3:00AM. It's not pretty. But, alas, I do love my electric blanket.

Perhaps next year I'll go into the import / export business and bring into New Zealand a container ship filled with fiberglass insulation, Tyvek, and weather stripping. Then again, maybe I'll just chalk all this up to one of the many curiosities of my time on this side of the globe that I enjoy so much. Now please excuse me while I change into my thermal sleeping attire and do a little snow dance before hitting the sack. There is a storm coming but we need snow pretty badly, and I'm not averse to a little superstitious snow dancing, particularly if it warms up my extremities.

Photographic Evidence

It's been exceptionally busy here in Wanaka and at Treble Cone, training new staff, spiffing up the place and then working out the kinks during our first two weeks of business. With the two busiest weeks of the season beginning this coming weekend, the whole resort will be rockin' and we're all eager and ready for it. When it's all over and we catch our breath, I'll provide a little more context. For now, here's some photographic evidence for those of you who still don't believe how sweet it is down here in the Southern Alps.