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.

Jet Lag

To-do list: (1) update business levels and instructor sign-out spread sheets, (2) complete master staff contact list for current season, (3) complete notes on new training clinic idea, (4) label photos from spring travels, (4) organize photos for calendar project, (5) create new iTunes playlist for gym, (6) review iTunes library to make sure all composers' names are inserted consistently, (7) write new piece for blog about what to do while lying in bed wide awake from 4:00AM.

As I write, I've been awake for five and a half hours and it is now 9:30AM here in Wanaka. The truth is that I jinxed myself yesterday after completing my long journey to New Zealand. I was catching up with some good friends in a café yesterday afternoon and, despite knowing better, I caved in and had a big bowl of coffee. I even made a joke to the waitress about needing a cup big enough to swan dive into it, and man-o-man did she deliver. Moron! The caffeine wore off by early evening, I was catatonic by 7:30PM, fought like a champ, and then gave up and was snoring like a chain saw by 9:00. I am now paying the price. It'd be one thing if it were summer here and the days were long and sunny, but it's still pitch black outside, to say nothing of the damp weather. And my house is cold. And I have no internet or cable TV yet to make the time pass. So, despite having gotten plenty of sleep during my 26 hours of flying, it's just me, my now completed ministerial work items, my unlabeled photos, and my first post from the 2010 New Zealand season.

On my flight from Auckland to Christchurch, I sat next to a young Canadian woman arriving for her first Southern Winter. She was giddy, nervous, excited and 'totally stoked', and our conversation really brought home the extraordinary experience of doing what we do. We talked about the essentials of adjusting to life in New Zealand: Kiwis' weird names for standard coffee drinks, their strange issues relating to vowel pronunciation, and what they mean when they answer a question "yih, yih, yih, nah, nah". All the while, I watched the look on her face as she snuck glances across the aisle to the sun rising over the snowy peaks of the Southern Alps as the reality of just how beautiful it is here literally and figuratively dawned on her. Observing that sort of energy from someone experiencing the start of her first endless winter was the perfect way to get me in mode for my arrival. This is my fourth season in Wanaka and my fifth Southern Winter overall. What this means is that over the next few days I'll begin my 15^th winter of the past decade. The truth confirmed for me by my flying companion is that I remain nonetheless very excited to be back. Now I just need a little daylight and a full day staying awake without any caffeine, and I'll be ready to enjoy my season to the fullest.

Speaking of being excited, the amount of snow that has fallen on the Southern Alps has been extraordinary so far, and Treble Cone doesn't even open until the end of the month. Flying over the mountains in Canterbury yesterday en route to Wanaka, the snow line was down to nearly the shores of Lake Pukaki, Lake Tikapo and Lake Ohau, and the contrast of the white mountains and iridescent aquamarine lakes in the light of the sunrise was just another in a long string of mental images I won't soon forget. The photos above and below are of Treble Cone as seen from my house this morning, with the groomed runs and base lodge visible in the midst of an astonishing amount of pre-season snow. The reports from our operations team have become ever more giddy, and rightly so. There's a lot to do in the next couple of weeks to get ready and, as long as it keeps snowing, generating enthusiasm from the resort staff, from our guests and from ourselves will be the easiest thing we do all season.

Green Means Go

Though I live and work in Vermont in the Northern Winter and in Wanaka, New Zealand in the Southern Winter, my home is in a very small town in the remote Northwest corner of Connecticut.

Often during the winter in VT, people will ask where I'm from and, upon hearing that I'm from Connecticut, they will conjure images of the wealthy, crowded suburbs of New York City that line the Connecticut shoreline abutting the Long Island Sound. People are amazed when I explain that there are mountains in Connecticut, that there is no highway where I live, no chain stores, strip malls or even traffic lights. While a large number of wealthy New Yorkers do have second homes in the area, there are enough working farms to keep all of us honest, and we're far enough away and hard enough to get to that our town remains relatively unspoiled. What amazes people the most is when I tell them that it's greener here than even Vermont, that when the leaves are finally full in Spring it's so green here it almost hurts the eyes.

"The Berkshires?", you may ask, "Really?" It is precisely this 'off-the-radar' aspect of being here that brings me such peace of mind. It provides a distinct lack of pretension and an ease to our existence, along with the confidence that we can continue doing what we do, at our pace, with our people, without pressure.

Right now, in early June, the ancient oaks that so dominate our woodlands are finally in their deepest green sartorial splendor. On long rides through the winding country roads that ring the river valleys and ribbon the hillsides, my bike fitness is now at the point where I can enjoy the place without the aches and pains of early season. One more month and I'll really be able to pour it on ... except I don't have another month. At precisely the moment when things are at their most spectacular here, once again I will be departing for another winter on the other side of the planet. I've said it before and I'll say it now: it's not that I don't like summer, it's that I willingly sacrifice it to explore my passion for and pursue my career in alpine skiing.

Panglossian rants aside, at least the parting mental images I have of my home here will be of the countryside at it's peak of green as I love it best. For me, once again, green means go. I'll continue to report in from winter in the Southern Alps of New Zealand, and I'm sure it'll be yet another terrific season there. I will occasionally, however, day dream of greener, warmer pastures, and think of home.

Feeding Frenzy

Disclaimer: this post has nothing whatsoever to do with my usual subjects of skiing, ski teaching, life in the mountains, or sociological considerations for outdoor play time for children. It does, however, have to do with time spent outdoors observing nature unaffected by man and how fundamentally cool it can be. I spent some time on a boat on the salt water Kiawah River in South Carolina this morning. It's not exactly the middle of an enormous national park, but there is a remarkable abundance of wildlife and unspoiled natural landscape here, including a great deal of wetlands and waterways. The short excursion this morning was intended to observe a variety of native Atlantic Bottlenose Dolphins known locally as River Dolphins, and the animals did not disappoint. The video below is of a practice unique to the local dolphin population referred to as "strand feeding", where multiple dolphins corral a school of fish by swimming around them on multiple sides, stranding them on the banks of the river and then chowing down like it's a buffet line at one of the local golf resorts. It's really pretty amazing to see, and I'm pretty lucky to have gotten it on film. Enjoy.