Simple Joys

This past Sunday morning, a friend and colleague made a keen observation that was simple, interesting and important. Despite having opened with two meters of new snow on the ground several weeks ago, Treble Cone hasn’t had any additional snow since. That is until this past Sunday. A decent size storm rolled in Sunday afternoon that is continuing to batter our resort with very cold air (by New Zealand standards), a lot of wind, and a lot of snow. Deep, dry snow. The snow started falling around mid-day so that by the time of our afternoon group lineup for the Snow Sports School, there was already several inches of fresh powder on the ground. With few guests around to take lessons, a snowball fight broke out among the instructors at lineup. It got serious, with the requisite chest thumping, trash talking, and trickery. Our young Kiwi snowboard instructor with serious cricket credentials proved no match for a youth spent playing dodgeball, baseball and softball on the playgrounds of America. It was a blast, everyone participated, and it was the kind of spontaneous, joyous play one usually associates with children.

My friend’s observation of this was that our staff played like children released from school for a snow day despite the fact that they are all experienced, highly trained snow sports professionals who play on snow for a living. Not one of us was grizzled enough, jaded enough, or grumpy enough to not find the arrival of snow an occasion worthy of unpretentious, unscripted, and uninhibited play. What makes our staff such great professionals is that they (and so many others in our resort) are able to transmit the joy found in fresh snow (and even in old snow) to our guests. It’s one of the most important things we do as instructors.

By the time Treble Cone opened Monday morning we had more than 20 centimeters in the base area. In an extremely rare set of circumstances, there were several centimeters on the ground along the lakeside in Wanaka and a lot of ice on the roads, making travel very difficult. This meant that the lift line, when our base-area six-seater opened this morning, was filled with instructors in uniform and only a few intrepid civilians. We were giggling, whooping and hollering, and generally having a ball, reveling in the joys of a great powder day. And then we went to work, which really just meant sharing all that joy with our guests. It’s a great job, and at Treble Cone it’s done by a remarkable collection of passionate and gifted professionals.

A Standing Start

As I write, we’re approaching the end of the busiest two weeks of the season here at Treble Cone – the New Zealand July school holidays. We’ll have to wait and see what the numbers bear out but, anecdotally, it’s seems like a very successful start of the season for our resort. One month ago, this  seemed to be a remote possibility at best, and that’s worth an explanation.

Treble Cone was due to open for the season on June 23rd. With unseasonably warm and sunny weather for weeks beforehand, our opening was delayed two weeks due to lack of snow (in truth, the complete absence of snow). All but essential staff at the resort were laid off for the two weeks (“stood down”, in polite Kiwi parlance) and we were able to complete almost none of the prep work and training necessary to open to the public with all systems go. Thankfully, those two weeks were gloriously sunny and warm and I lulled myself into a routine of long walks and day hikes around town, daily trips to the gym, and a ritualized gaze across Lake Wanaka to see if our snowmakers had made progress.

Towards the end of two weeks of keeping ourselves busy in this most beautiful of places, it started to snow. A lot. For Six days. All day every day. Between about the 5th of July, Treble Cone received 2 meters of snow. That’s six and a half feet in six days, for the metric impaired. The snow fell so hard and fast, and at such low elevations, that the avalanche danger made our access road unsafe to travel if it had been passable at all. At one point, several key staff were actually flown into the resort by helicopter to get some work done! On several days, the rostered staff drove to the bottom of the mountain at our normal early hour and waited for clearance from our Ski Patrol doing avalanche work on the slopes above the road only to be turned around and sent home because of the danger. In a normally exceptionally snowy year, the snow line hovers just below the elevation of the base lodge at TC – a week after the storm ended, the snow line was still almost all the way down to the valley floor. 2 meters in six days, for crying out loud. After two weeks of looking nervously at a brown mountain we had so much snow that we couldn’t open the damn resort!

When we finally opened on Thursday, July 14th with only half the terrain available because of the avalanche danger, we got hit with a tidal wave of people. Our new sales software and lift pass system were still works in progress, the staff hadn’t been completely trained, the kitchen staff had to pull all-nighters to get the food prepped, and then every season pass holder, every dedicated powder hound, and every testosterone junkie in the Pacific Rim converged on Treble Cone all at once. It was nuts, and the skiing and riding was absolutely sick! Sweet as. Ridiculous. Genuinely epic. And the two week school holidays began that Saturday.

Honestly, the fact that we’ve been able to get the place up to speed, make our guests happy and generally operate the resort at the standard of excellence we expect around here in a credit to our amazingly dedicated staff. It borders on the miraculous, to be perfectly honest, and we’re all walking around gob-smacked by the turnaround.

The bags under our eyes and the sniffling by large number of our staff tells the story of how much work it took to make this happen and how trying the past month has been on all of us, myself included. To put a fine point on it, we’re all pooped. As I write, I’m enjoying my first day off in several weeks while yet another storm is roaring its way in to batter Treble Cone this afternoon and tonight. Things should ease up at work as we move through into August and business reduces from a rolling boil to a light simmer, and I’ll get to pick my head up and spend more time reminding myself why I love skiing at TC and with its people so much. In the meantime, I think I’ll take a nap. And dream of tomorrow’s powder.

While We're Waiting

We're still waiting for the weather to turn here in Wanaka, waiting for our season to start at Treble Cone. On the upside, though these first few weeks of our season normally bring cold, gray, rainy weather here in town (with an inversion bringing sunshine to TC), the last two weeks since our originally scheduled opening have been glorious, sunny and warm. If we're going to be stuck here in town, wandering around, working hard to stay busy, at least it's been terrific. The truth is that, despite the anxiety of waiting for the weather to turn into proper winter, it's great to be reminded that there are many reasons I love coming to Wanaka for the Southern Winter, with skiing at Treble Cone only one of them.

Yesterday, I made an impromptu drive to Glendhu Bay with some friends just to look at the view. We sat, skipped rocks into the lake, considered the season yet to come, and generally contemplated the astonishing beauty around us. It was like a mini-vacation, and for a few moments we forgot about the waiting game and were able to enjoy the company and our surroundings in the simplest way possible. The question remains: in the Southern Hemisphere, should I be doing my snow dance backwards?

Nostradamus

The Buchanan Range from Treble Cone on June 21, 2011

The volcanic ash in the lower atmosphere over New Zealand will act like cloud seeding and result in an exceptionally snowy winter here.  The large-scale earthquakes in the Pacific Rim have caused a two degree shift in the earth’s axis affecting weather patterns in a way that will dramatically increase our snowfall. Every year in which Western Canada has had a banner ski season, the South Island resorts have oddly similar storm and snowpack patterns. Nostradamus predicted that 2011 will bring a record amount of snow storms to the Southern Lakes region, leaving Treble Cone’s famously devoted Coneheads grinning from ear to ear (not that will see their smiles through the snow-snorkels necessary in the chin-deep powder). I feel in my gut that it’ll be a great year at Treble Cone. We’re just due. I can smell it.

There’s an old joke at home in Vermont that the two most optimistic types of people in the world are alcoholics and ski instructors. That may or may not be true, but those of us who have been living and working in the mountains for a long time know one thing for certain: it is going to snow, we are going to ski and ride at Treble Cone, and it’s going to be great. In seasons like this one that begin dry and unseasonably warm, when our colleagues and our guests become agitated about the lack of snow, we spend lots of time reassuring them: we’ve been through this before, and it is going to snow.

While working hard to get our resort ship-shape for the season, we’ve all been looking anxiously at the forecast as our brown mountain looms over Lake Wanaka. After much agonizing and consternation, our opening has been delayed pending a change in the weather that brings snowmaking temperatures, a good sized storm, or both. Some among us are putting their faith in explanations that verify our confidence about the upcoming banner year – some explanations have an apparent scientific basis and some are a bit, err, further out the spectrum. I prefer to rely on the tried and true snow dance, described in detail by me in this space before: pajamas, helmet, goggles, ski or snowboard boots, living room, ski/ride movie. For the desperate, strapping on skis or board and doing 180’s on the bed is particularly satisfying. I’m not sure that my snow dance actually affects the weather, but it is pretty funny, it’s a good distraction, and it helps keep us focused and positive as we look to the horizon for some sign, some good news. It will snow on Treble Cone’s legendary terrain, it’ll snow a lot, and I for one will be there and will be ready to enjoy every minute, each and every flake. I just know it. In my gut. And Nostradamus said so. And there’s that whole volcano cloud-seeding thing. And Canada had a great year. And we’re due …

A Young Country

New Zealand is a young country. The British may scoff at what constitutes “old” in New England, but the Pilgrims landed in Plymouth long before the Brits established their first settlements here in New Zealand. In geologic terms, New England is positively ancient compared to these islands in the South Pacific. One look at the jagged peaks of the South Island and the lava flows on the North Island confirms that in many ways this place continues to be a work in progress.  It is the earthquakes, however, that bring the youth of these islands into the rarefied light of day – recently with disastrous results.

During the NZ winter of 2009, I experienced my first earthquake. My house rattled a bit and there were whitecaps in my landlord’s outdoor pool but it was pretty innocuous all things considered. In 2010, Wanaka experienced the tremors from a large quake centered in rural Canterbury. That one literally bounced me out of bed, caused rock slides that closed the road to Treble Cone for the day, and deeply affected the lives of many of Canterbury’s farming families in what already had been a tough year for them. Luckily the 2010 quake struck Christchurch at a time when the downtown area was quiet. And then there's 2011.

It’s hard to articulate the effects of the large earthquake that struck downtown Christchurch this past February. Though the huge Japanese earthquake and astonishingly horrific tsunami that followed this past spring may have trumped the attention garnered by the Christchurch quake, the effects of the earthquake on Kiwi communities are still spreading and evolving. My recollection is that the death toll was around 180 in Christchurch. Obviously, the scale of the events in Japan was far greater, but in this small country, 180 deaths represents an enormous number of Kiwis. Many remain homeless, may more have had their ability to do their jobs compromised by massive destruction to the infrastructure, and the economy is struggling to revive. The downtown area of Christchurch, the largest city on the South Island, is effectively a non-entity.

Another earthquake struck Christchurch on Tuesday morning while I was traveling to New Zealand from my home in Vermont. Thankfully, it appears that there have been few deaths. The greater issue, however, is the emotional aftershocks felt by a population already reeling. I can only imagine what it’s been like for the city’s residents. The analogies are easy to craft – writers freely use “bedrock” to mean something that is unshakable, understanding the deeply felt emotions occurring when the earth literally moves beneath ones feet. After a NZ summer of aftershocks and now another quake, ‘shaken’ must not be close to describing the emotions of the city’s and the region’s residents.

I arrived here in Wanaka on Wednesday afternoon very excited to be back in this wonderfully beautiful place. Many of the people with whom I will spend my time over the coming days and months are not from New Zealand, have no family here, and will doubtless be able to consider the effects of these earthquakes with a certain detachment, enjoying the short-sighted luxury of thinking that they have not been affected personally. I consider myself very lucky that in the few years I’ve been coming to Wanaka to work at Treble Cone I’ve become close friends with many local residents who are not a part of the itinerant circus of young resort employees and nomadic snow-junkies. They have provided me with a sense being welcome and of belonging in a way that leaves me grateful for a greater attachment to the place than I might not otherwise have. I look forward to catching up with my Kiwi friends in the coming days, to hearing their voices and seeing the look in their eyes as they tell me about how the world in Wanaka and on the South Island is surviving, even flourishing in these trying times. While I am obviously grateful to not have felt these most recent quakes in a literal sense, I am anxious to reconnect in a way that allows me to feel them figuratively.

New Zealand is a young country. That youth affects the character of its people and is a major reason for the beauty of its landscape. In 2011, I can only hope that their youthful exuberance and the beauty that surrounds them will allow my friends and hosts here to survive the effects of the youthful nature of the ground on which they walk. I am confident that it will and that we will enjoy yet another powder-filled winter season at Treble Cone.

I should note that though the events in Christchurch have a tremendous effect on the people here in Wanaka, the city is a six hour drive away. At Treble Cone, our expectation is that the earthquakes and the conditions on the ground there will not impact on our operations. My hope is that people from across Australasia and the world will not be dissuaded from coming to the South Island, sharing all that Wanaka and Treble Cone have to offer.

The Storm's Wake

A massive, fast-moving and incredibly destructive storm whipped through Western New England this afternoon. Just my luck: I drove through the whole thing, making my way south from Vermont to my family's home in the northwest corner of Connecticut before heading to New Zealand next week. I've seen my share of tempests in my time in the mountains, but I don't recall ever having seen rain fall that hard or lightening strike so often, so close together, and so destructive (I'm not sure we really call them rain "drops" when they're the size of tablespoons). We won't know the full toll of it all until morning, but in driving through the Berkshires I saw a few enormous and ancient oak trees ripped from the ground roots and all and several near misses of tree trunks and houses. By 6:00PM it was all over, the skies cleared and gave way to some beautiful mists rising from the hillsides.

Friends and colleagues in Vermont often assume that all of Connecticut consists of the coastal suburbs of New York City that are so far from here, literally and figuratively, and they often express surprise and cynicism when I explain how rural and how mountainous it is here in our corner of the world. Our mountains may not be big, I tell them, but they do behave big. That was certainly the case today!

Hypothalmus Abuse

At the moment, I’m sitting outside my home nestled in the middle of some very green mountainside woods here in Vermont. The sky visible through the treetops is deep blue and free of clouds, and the light breeze moving through the old hardwood trees sounds vaguely like gentle waves lapping at the seashore. The temperature is a near perfect 72 degrees Fahrenheit (approximately 21C), though it feels a bit cooler in the shade, and the loudest sounds apart from the wind are the excited calls of a wide variety of birds, all but hidden from view. Just to keep me honest, I can occasionally hear a lawnmower in the distance and someone does drive down the close-by dirt road from time to time, but like the occasional passing cloud these disturbances only serve to emphasize the gorgeous nature of the day.

I’m not some dime-store philosopher doing my Thoreau imitation in my own personal Walden, I’m not about to wax reverentially about the need to protect our precious environment (though I could), and I certainly am not about to break into song like a member of the Von Trapp family (though they did migrate to Vermont - “The hills are alive with the sound of music …”). What I am doing is making mental lists. Sitting in my favorite old beach chair being warmed by the summer sun, I am busy considering some very pressing and time sensitive issues: the benefits of thermal underwear, how many boxer shorts I need to live comfortably, whether I should have backup goggles, whether I should risk fitting chains in the mud while wearing my new down jacket, and the weight saving benefits of certain articles of clothing. Yes, I’m preparing to pack. For another powder-filled winter. On the other side of the world. In Wanaka, New Zealand and at Treble Cone.

I may be behaving like a lizard sitting on a rock in the sun, but I’m excited to leave it all behind in less than a week, drive to the big city, get on a huge plane, spend a lot of time catching up on the movies I’ve missed, use the Air New Zealand staff to restart my ability to understand Kiwis, all the while throwing my hypothalamus for a loop for a few days of serious jetlag. Long black, flat white, tomato sauce, fush and chups, and eggs on burgers. Ok, got it.

Yes, a week from now I’ll get slightly confused trying to cross the street, I’ll settle into my new home for the season, I’ll get up to speed on the rugby World Cup schedule, and I’ll be very excited to catch up with everyone and get our resort ready for another great season in the Southern Alps. In the meantime, I’ll bank as much summer in my subconscious batteries as I can so that in the dark days of yet another winter, I can remain upbeat, focused, and energetic, especially once I get over the jet lag. Ski season, here I come!