Also – here’s a link to Eimear Brogan’s blog. She’s working as a physio in Haiti…

Well there has been quite the lack of posting on this blog… will have to make amends. Mostly I’ve been working away on Snowpool – with much help from two friends Paddy & Becks..

Firstly – climbing. Headed climbing outside (in Christchurch) with Julia for my first time since the earthquakes. Most of the crags have been closed because of rockfall hazard, but they’ve made a couple of them safe – so off we went. You can still see the rocks across the summit road where they fell in February?

Still, it was a great days climbing… lovely to be outside again.

Next, my first ever foray into the world of rhubarb and apple crumble (an unmitigated success)

Finally.. I’ve spent the last month or so (again, with lots of help from Paddy and Becks) working up to getting the word out about Snowpool. The first attempt at which was going to the CSA Ski Sale and handing out flyers.

Beck helped out with the graphic design and so we had flyers (and hoodies) to give out / show off. I’d ordered 1000 stickers from the US () which is a great site. I uploaded the image, they had a proof ready within an hour and printed within 2 days. Then it went to USPS to (priority) ship to New Zealand 7-10 days… and it arrived 24 days later one day after the ski sale. More than slightly irritating. Anyway, stickermule kindly gave me a discount off the next purchase, and life goes on with slightly more stickers than I was expecting to have left!

I’ve made video’s to show ski fields how to take info from Snowpool and put it into their websites and twitter, facebook etc. It’s quite ridiculous how hard it is to get the ski fields to do this. I mean.. here’s a service that will

• Save people money
• Be more environmentally friendly
• Get more people up the hills to their fields if they help promote
• Less wear and tear on their roads

And probably a lot of other reasons… you think they’d be proactive about it. But no. It’s completely ridiculous.

Anyway, rant over… hopefully it’ll be a great ski season… I’m intruiged to see whether all this marketing will give a real boost to the numbers. We’ll see.

So.. one of the nice things to come out of these measely earthquakes is Gapfiller. Basically they setup installations (could be anything from an old fridge on a random corner with books in it) to….

The Dance-o-mat

This was our route for a two day tramp over Easter. I spent the other two days working on Snowpool a bit (yes, it is rather all consuming… but I love it!) Sylvia came along for the tramp too which was excellent. She took me on one of my first tramps back in 2004! 2004… I really have been here a while.

Anyway, some pictures.

There was quite a bit of river hopping getting to Hamilton Hut.. It was quite busy as it was Easter. There were hunters (even one person we saw with a bow and arrows!).. there was one .. nutter.. who upon seeing a possum we’d found with our torches (by accident) went inside to get his rifle. At 9pm (dark) with people around. Unbeknownst to us there was another hunter bivving on the ground closeish to where the possum had last been seen (he escaped, thankfully)… you can see how accidents happen. Nutter.

Nice walk out the next day though ;)

All in all a lovely tramp, and definitely good to get out and stretch the legs.

This actually brought tears to my eyes!

of happiness.