Ski and Snow

I am writing this on the 1st of June, and it is cold; we go to print in a week and the only word that comes to mind is anticipation. The winter salivation has begun, like a dog waiting for dinner you start dribbling for snow, you start looking at the weather, storms coming, temperature dropping, the odd dump of snow. Then all of a sudden, a big storm hits, and some areas, like Mt Dobson get over 2m in one night. Each year we go through this same process wishing for an early season but knowing regardless it will come. Putting Ski and Snow Magazine together you get to see what’s new, what is hot and what is the same. But it is all part of building that anticipation which…

If Nico Porteous was a rugby player or if he hit a golf ball, he would be on the front and centre of the sporting pages throughout New Zealand. But Nico is a halfpipe skier, not a main stream sport, so despite being one of the best in the world, little is known about Nico outside of the world of skiing. Nico is an Olympic bronze medallist, an X Games gold medallist in freeski halfpipe and current freeski halfpipe World Champion. He made history at the PyeongChang 2018 Olympic Winter Games, becoming NZ’s youngest Olympic medallist when he was just 16 years old. He is New Zealand’s first freeskier to earn an Olympic medal and the first male New Zealand athlete to medal at the Olympic Winter Games. He made history…

Let’s rewind to early 2020, when flying internationally was a regular part of my skiing life. I boarded a flight to the capital of Indonesia, Jakarta, to meet with the Indonesian Government, Minister of Tourism, to propose a project to get funding for a film project that was in the works to ski the last remaining tropical glacier in West Papua. I then flew back to Canada for a couple of weeks to shoot some ski photos before boarding a plane back home to NZ to complete my Snow and Ice Training Course (Part of the NZMGA ski guide pathway). After ten days, I once again boarded a plane back to my base in Canada to finish the Northern Hemisphere winter. During this time, I must say I was pretty naive…

Skiing in New Zealand is a relatively small sport at the professional and semi-professional level, and it does not take long to know pretty much everyone. Four or five years ago we started working with Finn. He is one of the real characters of New Zealand skiing and a really great guy to work with. But more than that he is a huge talent. In 2016, at the age of 16, Finn won two medals for NZ at the Youth Olympic Winter Games in Oslo. Finn won the Breakthrough Season category at the 2016 Snow Sports NZ Annual Awards and was a finalist for the Emerging Talent award at the 2017 Hallberg Awards. Finn was then named to the NZ team to compete at the 2018 Olympic Winter Games in…

What is Obsidian? We hear you ask! Well it was the biggest snow sports event of 2020, with the finest kiwi talent competing in five epic challenges. The challenges were a mix of showing off their sporting steeze, as well as their film making talents! But how did we get here? The Winter Games NZ was founded in 2009 and since then there has been 8 editions of this snow sports jewel in the Southern Hemisphere’s crown. The event normally hosts the World Cup events in Park and Pipe and is the first event of the FIS calendar. But when Covid hit and international travel dried up, New Zealand was in a unique position to still host a world class event with homegrown talent. The Winter Games NZ team realised they…

SKIING IN NEW ZEALAND If covid has taught us anything good, it has taught us to realise how lucky we are. Not just in how we have been able to handle the virus with limited lockdowns, but it made us more introspective. Instead of looking offshore we looked at what was at home, and I have not met anyone who has not seen the real value in that. As winter draws in, and we begin to explore our own backyard, we can appreciate that its not only the major resorts that offer great skiing but there is also an abundance of club fields (open to the public) just waiting to be explored. Whilst the majority of these ski club fields are quite small, they all offer unique experiences. The next few pages are…