A White Christmas 
Christmas 2009 I went to heaven… For years now Cas has been on my back about how much I’d love mountaineering and how much bloody fun it was. I wasn’t sold…I mean seriously?! Ice climbing, crevasses, high altitude, avalanches…did that sound fun? Surely not? Part of me loved the idea; the rawness of it all, but the rebellious streak that didn’t like being told what to do refused to cave in and vehemently denied that I’d enjoy it. ‘It’s too dangerous’ anyways it would say (like paddling to NZ was safe idea…). With our plans for an Antarctic expedition looming on the horizon, I had to bite the bullet and gain the skills we would need for some very serious snow, ice and glacial travel. At the end of last year, with some trepidation, I decided to do a TMC and spend some time over in the NZ Alps. Alpine Guides Technical Mountaineering Course (TMC) A TMC is a course where you learn all the fundamentals you need to know about safely climbing alpine peaks. In terms of the world, you can’t ask for a better place to learn than NZ. I was told ‘If you survive 3 or 4 seasons mountaineering in NZ, you’ll be a good climber anywhere in the world’ – Yiicks! I was luckily enough to get into a TMC with ALPINE GUIDES one of the best companies in NZ and a bloody good crew to boot! A big thank you to Bryan Glover who runs Alpine Guides for his advice and help getting into the course (I may have been fairly late with my booking). In my part of the course there were four students and two guides; NZ legend Murray Ball, who has put up some extremely tough routes right around the world, (I think of him as the Larry Gray to the climbing world) and ultra fit Mike Trehearne, from Canmore, Canada. Over the next 10 days despite some atrocious weather we learnt everything from glacier travel, rope skills, rock pro, climbing, snow protection, crevasse rescue, etc basically ‘how not to fall off a mountain’. Giddy from all the learning on the course, I decided to stick around for another two weeks and that’s where the real fun began. I teamed up with another bloke from the course; Lachlan Griffin from Darwin, and over the next two weeks we had an absolute blast. We battled on the moraine of the Tasman Glacier, had a coupla unplanned bivvies on the snow, helped out with the evac of a girl that had a pretty nasty fall (got a free chopper ride out of it - score) and climbed our arses off whenever the weather would let us! Whilst over there we hit up the Minarets, Mt De la Beche, Nun’s Veil and the Footstool…some of them, we even got up! A highlight was running into an Irish bloke (who was only tramping around NZ) that refused to carry a water bottle. He’d only walk around with a mug and drink from all the abundant streams flowing around NZ!! Only the Irish… Check out the pictures in our new gallery! Well back to work now…James and I are bloody fired up about this year. 2010 is going to be huuuge! Big plans, big trips and loads of fun to be had. 
I‘d like to make a big shout out to Brad and Ingrid from GEARCORP down in Manly (formerly Activate Outdoors), Rob Barlow from ICEBREAKER (I wouldn’t be caught dead in anything else in the cold) and Steve Winnacott from THE NORTH FACE.Thanks for helping me sort my kit at the very last moment. You guys are legends! Happy 2010. Justin |
