The weather is not being particularly supportive of J's and my desire to be snowboarding as many weekends as possible, but it is still the beginning of the season, so we have plenty of time.
I thought I'd go ahead and share our pictures from our first trip, although I'm sure I'll have lots more by the end of the season.
It's a 4 1/2 hour drive, which is a bit of a pity, but there are stunning views along the way, and as we get further up into Tongariro National Park, we get to start admiring the mountains themselves. This is Ruapehu, on which both of the ski fields are located.
Tongariro is on the left, and Ngaurahoe is on the right. Remember when I could see all three of these mountains from Mount Taranaki? That was pretty amazing.
Clouds blew in over the mountain as we drove up, but I still like this picture because it shows the pretty scrubby land we drove through near the end.
Even closer to the top, we get to these rocky areas.
We got all suited up and hit the slopes. Here's J on the chair lift. We'd never used this kind before, and it's clearly made for skiers to just ski right off of it at the top, but is much more challenging for snowboarders, as the angle is straight-on and you need to be sideways to snowboard. We got the hang of the dismount on the second day, but we fell a lot the first day. Unfortunately, we tried going on the same one once, and when we fell off, my snowboard cut J's leg! Three weeks later it's still healing, but no permanent damage done.
Here's J on the slope. It's always frustrating how flat it looks in pictures. It's certainly not terribly steep, as it's the beginner slope, but it's also not flat.
Look at J's good humour, even after a fall! By the way, fall is pretty much all we did the first day. The snow-machine generated snow had partially melted that morning, and then re-frozen by the time we got there. This resulted in hard, slippery snow that was hard to dig your board into (an intrinsic part of balance and turns) and horribly painful to fall on. We got rather more battered and bruised that usual. My knees got the worst of it for me (and swelled up like balloons), while J's cut leg was his most serious injury. Our good humour did somewhat run out towards the end of the day, so we elected for a good meal at a restaurant with a big fire, and then a relaxing evening at the hotel.
We went back the second day and tried again, despite being rather disheartened by our previous efforts. Fortunately, the snow was replenished and softer, and we regained enough balance to avoid falling much. It was an infinitely more productive and enjoyable day.
We even mastered the chair lift, snowboarding off it like pros, with (almost) no falls! We actually had very few falls the whole day, and were feeling very skilled and impressed with ourselves, zipping down the slope increasingly quickly.
We had some sunny times of day, which I delighted in, but J found too hot in all his gear...
... and times when the clouds blew over and it was colder, which was fine since we were bundled up.
As we left, we were delighted by the layers of hills off in the distance, which were so clear as to seem unreal.
We got one last view of Ruapehu as we left, and I'm pretty sure it was inviting us to come back soon. We will get there as soon as we can!
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