I’ve been woefully inactive since being hit by two cars in nine days while cycling to/from work. The first accident wrote off my back (temporarily), and the second one wrote off my road bike (permanently). Anyway, there’s snow now, so I’ve been up at Awakino for the past two weekends. Last weekend was spent digging the rope out, drinking too much, and having a few hungover runs down the main face. This weekend, I was enrolled in an avalanche course.

We were split into two groups, with myself assigned to the sunday group. So, with beautiful blue skies on saturday, a few of us hiked up to the ridge to check out a popular run, fittingly named Ice Cream. The snow on the top, whilst not covering everything, was spectacular, and the 250 metre run was well worth the 3 hour hike up. A strong southerly hit us early on sunday morning, so the course was postponed, due to our need to get off the mountain as soon as possible. I arrived back in Dunedin to find the entire city blanketed in snow, so went to work to collect my laptop, crawled home up the hill, and got the fire going. It’s winter.