Broken River Ski Club

Over the past week there has been a storm "the size of Australia" off the West Coast of New Zealand. It dumped enough heavy snow down in Invercargill to collapse the roof of the local sporting complex, it blew hard enough in Wellington to ground airplanes scheduled to leave from the airport and it dumped a whole heap of snow in the mountains. Just when we thought the end of the ski season had arrived.

On Sunday morning, we woke up early and decided we just had to partake in this fresh dump. And we knew the perfect field at which to enjoy it at its fullest - Broken River. Located in the Craigieburn Mountains with a parking lot for about 30 vehicles, Broken River was just hopping that day. We were lucky to arrive early enough to grab one of the last parking spots in a snow bank (despite making it to the edge of Christchurch and having to go back for my wallet and student ID - gotta get that discount). After slipping and sliding into a spot, we threw on our gear and headed for the "Inclinator".

[The jam-packed parking lot - our car is the little silver station wagon in the bottom right corner]

The inclinator is a little cable car used to access the chalets way up the hill towards the tree line. After the 10 minute rumble up the steep rails, you get out onto wooden decking surrounding the ticket house. Here you buy your tickets, grab a nutcracker and head up the stairs. Lots and lots of stairs. There are two lodges tacked to the side of the beech forested hills, with decks and stairs connecting them together.

Finally you emerge from the trees and climb one last set of stairs up the ridge to just below the first lift. Broken River has only nutcrackers. Now if you ever go skiing in New Zealand, nutcrackers are an essential part of the kiwi ski experience. They are at most club fields and are, well, a challenge to learn. You have a harness with a rope coming from the front. At the end of the rope is a hunk of metal in the shape of, you guessed it, a nutcracker. So you stand beside the rope as it's towed up the hill grab onto it with your inside hand, then use your outside hand to quickly flick the nutcracker over the rope and hold onto the handle. This allows the rope to travel through the various pulleys along the tow without crushing your fingers. A good thing really, it's just a challenge to get the nutcracker over the rope before the first pulley eats your hand.

Deep, heavy "powder" covered the mountain. This stuff is unlike any powder I have previously encountered. I'm used to the light, fluffy stuff that can easily be plowed through, not this heavy, wet stuff that constantly wanted to eat my skis. It was soft though, which was a good thing for all the falls we suffered. And the energy required to turn was phenomenal. I felt out of shape after just 2 turns and had to take a break. But the day was beautiful and the snow was plentiful, so there was not much to complain about. Despite the unusual number of falls.

[Resting at the top of the ridge. Behind me is the Cass valley where we tramped and stayed at Hamilton Hut]

After a glorious day of skiing, falling and shaking snow out of our jackets, we sat down at the chalet and enjoyed a beer (well, I had a beer, Stephen had an L&P, being the responsible driver that he is). The sun shone down happily on us and we quietly nursed our bruises and bangs with smiles on our faces. Eventually, we got ourselves together and made our way back down the multitude of stairs and into the car. We stopped at the swimming pool on the way home for a well-deserved soak and tried not to think about having to go back to work the next morning.

And now for something completely different. . . .

SPRING!

The weather is turning. The birds are more and more raucous. And the flowers are popping up everywhere.

Christchurch, New Zealand Earthquake

[Stephen picking up the washing from the rubble]

[And the chimney that is still up there, threatening to come down in any of the aftershocks or perhaps the gale force winds tomorrow]

[All our clean water burst from the water main in front of the house]

[Standing knee deep in one of the cracks that appeared during the earthquake]

[The worst damage inside our apartment - cracked plaster and dust everywhere]

[The water was quickly boring its way under the road towards the river - a very fast underground torrent racing its way through the new cracks]

[The road outside our building was really bad - it's now dead quite out there with no traffic, making it somewhat otherworldly when you step outside onto the street]

[Some houses fared worse than others]

[Just before our BBQ dinner the firemen came and took some of the worst rubble off the roof. We're still waiting for a crane crew to come and take down the other two chimneys]

It's a funny feeling being in a disaster and I have to say the worst part of it is not during the actual event itself (though that was pretty horrible). No, its the hours and days (and presumably weeks) afterwards when everyone has to live with limited services; no water or sewage and gather up the pieces of their broken homes and try to put them back together. Tension runs high and people are apt to snap at the smallest thing. Yesterday, after the earthquake people were open and friendly and willing to talk, now they seem to be more on edge and snappy and frustrated. It's hard when everyone deals with this in their own way.

Stephen and I are fine. Although we have no water or sewage, we have been left with many liters of fresh water from friends and our landlords and there are porta-potties not too far away. The cat is finally out from under the stairs and we are about to head off to the grocery store to see what is left for our dinner tonight and possibly the next few. Lots of knitting and sewing time I suppose.

Hiking at Hanmer

On Sunday, after a good sleep in and big bowl of oatmeal, we headed into town for a round of mini golf before parting company and heading up into the hills. We tool the same road we had the day before for our ski trip, but this time stopped at the summit of Jack's Pass to hike up the mountain to the West of the road (I believe it is Mount Bain, from my extensive research while playing mini golf). We gobbled down a quick lunch before leaving the car and headed down the muddy trail.

Despite not being marked on any map we had seen the trail continued along the saddle we were parked in and up the ridge towards our intended destination. With no real rush or need to get anywhere in particular we wandered along the track as it wound its way between protruding greywacke spires, the newly emerging buds on the manuka, the thorny tumatakuru, and the wispy pygmy pine.

[miniature moss garden tucked safely beneath the shrubs]

[the view back to the car]

[Taramea or Wild Spaniard which is both stiffer and sharper than it looks]

[a tiny skull we found along the trail, we decided it was most likely a possum]

[walking along the ridge with the snow]

[the view from the top, well actually, it's just us]

[heading for home]

More Skiing (finally)

Last Friday, Stephen and I, along with some friends of ours, headed up to Hanmer Springs, a natural hotsprings at the northern end of the Canterbury plains. Hanmer Springs is quite a little tourist town, with a well developed hot pools system and loads of accommodation all at quite competitive prices. So we booked ourselves a house and made a weekend of it. With a ski field and lots of trails nearby, this was not too difficult an ask.

On Saturday, we woke up and ate a delicious breakfast of banana-coconut surprise pancakes with real maple syrup and lots of bacon (and black pudding for me). We pulled on our long johns and headed up to the ski field, dropping our friends off on the way for a hike. Little did we know the drive up to the ski field would be just as much of an adventure as actually skiing there.

The road was quite beautiful, winding its way up braided river valleys along gravelly paths, over tiny bridges and right smack, through the middle of farms.

After the final set of switch backs up the face of a cliff we pulled into a tiny parking lot with 7 other cars and pulled on our ski boots in the muddy puddles surrounding the car. It dawned on me there why customs asks about mud on your ski boots when you entre the country. I've never had the experience of walking in mud with my ski boots, but it seems relatively common here.

The snow did start somewhere though, at the far end of the lodge, just past the ski rack some lovely soft, heavy wet snow huddled on the ground, a metre from the lodge. . . just in case. Of what I'm not sure, but it wouldn't touch the place.

Once we had our lift tickets and nutcrackers we headed on up to the lifts. The short one was your average kiwi nutcracker - a must-do experience for a true kiwi-skiing adventure. Essentially, you have to grab onto a moving cable pulled between two pulleys, one at the top of the hill and one at the bottom. Once you are moving with the cable, you want to clinch it in your metal nutcracker (looks kind of like the skeleton of a traditional nutcracker used on nuts) and hold on tight until you reach the top. Word of advice: don't try clinching your nutcracker on from a standstill, this only ever ends in a face plant and being dragged face first up the hill by your arm and the nutcracker tied to your waist.

As you can see the ski field is suffering from the coming spring, but really this only made it better. Without trees there's nothing to try to avoid, but with the exposed grasses there was plenty to try and avoid. One would abruptly stop if one ski hit the grass as it has a somewhat lower slipperyness index than snow.

All in all, it was a glorious day of skiing. The entire morning was sunny with hardly any wind to speak of. We even watched the Farmer's Cup as they raced between flags to the bottom. Amuri Ski Club was first established by local farmers to give them some opportunity for snow sports, today just happened to be the annual day for them to all gather together with their families and throw themselves down the hill as fast as they could.

Around 3pm, the weather changed. Quickly. Very quickly. Like in 5 minutes it went from sunny skies to white out conditions. We took one last, wet ride to the top and stumbled our way down with no ability to see where the surface of the snow changed (ie. dropped away from under you). It was great fun.

We soon decided that it was time to head down, before we got socked in too badly and had to spend the night up in the very crowded lodge. What was snow on the field was rain down in the parking lot, so we quickly changed our shoes, got soaked and clambered into the car. We crept our way slowly back down the precarious cliff side road and watched as the big, fat rain drops turned the road to mush.

Once at the bottom, the skies had cleared and we headed back to town to take a relaxing dip in the hot pools.

Bring Back Black

For Stephen's birthday Jan put me in charge of getting us to an All Blacks game whenever they managed to make their way to Christchurch. Last Saturday night, the men in black were in town and they were playing the Aussies in the TriNations Cup series (kind of like the Stanley Cup for Rugby Union - but with only three teams; South African Springboks, Australian Wallabies and New Zealand All Blacks).

After a quick dinner of pizza (at home) and beer (at the local pub) Stephen, myself and our neighbour biked on down to the stadium. The organizers were trialling their road closures for the Rugby World Cup being hosted here next year, so all the roads within 2-3 blocks of the stadium were blocked off for cars and the streets were absolutely packed with people making their way on foot. We slowly wound our way through them and parked our bikes in front of the stadium gates. The crowd seemed to increase in volume as you approached the stadium, but we pushed our way into it and eventually streamed up the stairs and into the newly completed concrete stands.

Our seats were one step above the cheapest. This meant we were neither sitting right at midfield under cover, but nor were we crammed into the stands at either end of the field incapable of seeing what exactly was happening as the teams ran back and forth across the field. In fact we were pretty well placed in the first half to witness a couple of trys by the All Blacks into the Wallabies end.

It was fun to look around at all the people around us. Across the stadium on the opposite stand there was a little island of yellow (Wallabie colours) drifting in a sea of black and silver. On our side there were little isolated dots of yellow, but mostly it was black . . . . and loud. There was a group a few seats down from us draped in the New Zealand flag with faces painted in black and white screaming as if their lives depended on it. In front of us were a group of older guys full of sarcasm and trash talking for the two Aussies sitting next to them (who seemed to hold their own well enough). Towards the end of the second half, both groups were folding paper airplanes and seeing who could get theirs onto the field of play (the second half of the game was not all that exciting). And behind us was a man and his 6 year-old son, who could have been a rugby commentator. In fact, he was for me.

Despite a lousy forecast the rain was light and there was no wind, so our wool blanket and blue tarp stayed folded and tucked into our bag. Unlike our previous rugby experience when we were drenched and frozen to our seats while watching the New Zealand Warriors (Rugby League) pound some Australian team into the ground. This evening in comparison was pleasant and enjoyable. The game itself was somewhat unexciting though and the All Blacks were unable to achieve the five trys they needed to win the TriNations Cup that night. They're still well in the lead, but we'll just have to wait and see how Australia plays against South Africa in the following weeks.