Sweet As...New Zealand, Issue 15.8

Ideas Born

After a good day riding we sometimes get together for dinner at my house. Travis Rice, Carsten Bahnson, Rich Goodwin, photographer Doctor Zapalac, and myself had been exploring snowmobile-access terrain deep in the Wyoming backcountry, so this was one of those nights...

As we ate we talked of our day, upcoming plans, and our whereabouts for the remainder of the season. The topic of summer riding came up and no one seemed to have a set plan yet since it was mid-February with winter in full swing. I began telling them about my past experiences of getting summer powder in the southern alps of New Zealand. My stories of cheap heli operations and exceptional terrain raised the interest of the crew...it's a land where glaciers descend into rainforests and people say "sweet as..."a lot. The natives call it Aotearoa - meaning "Land of the Long White Cloud."

Reality

Nearly five months later and after endless phone tag and e-mail correspondence, we were on our way. It was crazy - just two weeks before we left, everyone was off traveling and no one had plane tickets yet. Doc was in a small village in the Czech Republic and Travis was in some remote corner of Minnesota fishing - living in a box with no phone. Carsten and I were in Mexico. Everyone was off the map and how we all coordinated our tickets was a haphazard mess that somehow worked out eventually.

A very long day...

Our crew landed in Auckland, New Zealand, in pre-dawn darkness with only a light glow to the east and the grid-patterned streetlights shining and flickering below. It's a thirteen-plus hour flight. We could have been anywhere - there was nothing to give us the slightest idea of the incredibly diverse and strange land we had just entered.

New Zealand is made up of two major islands; the northern one which is flatter with a line of volcanoes running north to south. It's lush with vegetation and has a subtropical climate. The South Island is a few degrees cooler and made up of a long spine of mountains - the Southern Alps, separating the East and West Coasts. The steep mountains of the West Coast get hammered by powerful storms spawned off of Antarctica - the result is far more precipitation in the West than on the dryer, flatter East Coast. With it's maritime climate the weather can change very quickly here.