Excellent weekends snowboarding at temple basin (Dave, Neil, Anthony). Not a huge crowd up there, which certainly made all the difference as I didn’t need to worry about crashing into people (too much). Hopefully a few pics to come sometime, I didn’t bring my camera this time, so no pics of the really scenic lodge we stayed in.. or the off piste skiing we did.
This guy writes about NZ skiing very well.. and explains the infamous nutcrackers. Basically the club fields here have a very simple mechanism for getting up the slopes. There’s a fast moving rope running over metal wheels, you grab onto the rope with one hand (with a leather glove protector to stop your glove melting (they do)), and then once you’re up to speed on the rope, you get what looks like a nutcracker (attached by a foot long rope to a belt harness attached to you) and whip it over the rope so that it grabs on. Then you simply hold on for dear life. lots of fun
I’d learned before on the pummers and t-bars that you should leave your back foot out of the snowboard… however here, it was best to put both feet in. The reason became quite apparent when one of the other people on the ski-field (a snowboarder) managed to fall towards the top of the tow-rope. They tumbled down the quite steep and icy slope, but with only having one foot locked in.. well.. I think they got away with just a broken knee..
Definitly exciting though, I mean those ropes are *fast* and the slopes are damn steep, really do hope I get some pics. So that’s probably the end of the snow season for this year, but am really quite happy with the progress I’ve made..
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