Hey Everyone,
For the first month of being here in NZ I updated this blog sometimes 3 times a week. As I sunk into life in Wanaka and skiing, it became harder and harder to update and as the updates wore thin so did emails from home so it became a vicious circle of sorts..... Anyways, thats my excuse and I am sticking to it, point is I am doing laundry today, lazing around town and figured it would be a perfect day to finally do the big update that I have been promising but has never really happened.
I left all of you when I first got into Wanaka, the season was starting and I was pretty excited about the concept of working for Base. The season definitly started with a bang... TONNES of snow with a bunch of amazing, memorable powder days. The amazing thing with New Zealand during the winter is there is usually two types of weather up at the hill, normally its either dumping snow, with crappy light and you cant see a thing. That or it is brilliant blue sky and sunny... the latter being most of the time and it normally turns out that right after a big dump it goes bluebird which is of course amazing for riding. When I got down here I had in mind a summer spent in the park teachign myself how to jib and have a great time jumping and hitting rails, but as i got here and heard everyones rants about Treble Cone which is the local freeriding hill, I decided to get a pass for there as well as snowpark. This turned out to be a great decision and led to many great days riding some really interesting Big Mtn Terrain. I was having so much fun riding this terrain that I started missing my Big, fat stiff skis from back, so much so that my friend Jason (who also happens to be the Armada Rep for NZ) talked me into buying a new pair of skis... a pair of big (188 cm) and really fat big mtn skis... which i instantly fell in love with.
With new skis in hand, Luke and Darryl (the brits from whistler that work with me) had a few great days charging Treble Cone, dropping everything in site and straightlining everything else. Everyone on the mountain seemed to notice us because we were the only ones out charging and definitly noticable with Luke's bright neon orange snowpants. As I was working around the shop later in the week, i found out that a few people had come back to Brent, who owns base, and told him about some of his workers that were ripping it up at TC and being really impressive. Brent in turn was so impressed that he put Luke and I on the Base freeride team, which is a team of riders in Wanaka that are up and coming. Base supports them, sponsors competitions and helps them out getting future sponsors. After being put on the team we got to do the NZ freeskiing open big mtn, which is a pretty good international comp. Basicly Big Mountain competitions work on a judging system where the person who skis the most technical line the best with the most style wins... I was really excited about my line, but after crashing on my first drop, I ended up disappointingly back in the field. Coming out of the comp, even though I didnt do nearly as well as I wanted to, I learned alot about competing as well as choosing lines, it was really good and definitly brought me back to my days racing.
After the comp, a pretty big front came through, one that everyone thought would bring a bunch of new snow and more powder days. All the excitment quickly vanished as the temps stayed warm and rain poured down on our amazing snow. After trying to pull in a couple days at TC I realized that the big mtn riding wasnt really on anymore, with rocks pocking through and super slushy snow, I retreated to the park. Snowpark is arguably the best park terrain in the world, with the whole hill commited soley to park. It has the best Pipe, cut by Frank Wells (cuts the xgames pipes as well as all the other major events..) so all in all its a pretty good place to push myself and try to learn how to ride park a little better. It has been really great to go up everyday in the sun and soft snow and ride park all day... finally been able to do some things that I tried all season back home. Hopefully it doesnt stay so warm as all the snow will melt, but for the time being its pretty amazing.

Thats pretty much on the Ski front... pretty much all I do these days is work and ski. Last weekend was the big Base party, which was a great time (well sunday wasnt such a great time... but thats to be expected). Right now I am just trying to iron out plans for the rest of my journeys. Right now my plan is to go to Australia for 2 weeks, hit Fiji for a few weeks and then get back home to Calgary for December. After spending christmas at home and taking some time to see my friends I have decided to try to make the move to Whistler, after hearing where everyone is going this year, I think it makes the most sense if I want to have a great year riding with friends. These plans totally rely on how much money I have left at the end of the season, but I think if I try hard, then they should work.

Anyway, I think thats it for now... I will try (key word try) to update more often, especially once the season here is over and I start to travel again. I really appreciate everyones emails and please keep them up as its great to hear what is happening back home.
cheers,
-Jesse