Heli spa.. Welcome to Queenstown

7/9/2015

For about the first time ever I have arrived in Queenstown when there is good snow at the start of the season. Everyone is amped thinking its going to be the best snow year ever so hopefully it will be. With so much snow around and the snow so low we were lucky enough to go heli to film for the first episode of Diaries Down Under. This has never happened before, usually we stumble around a thin amount of snow, breaking through to rock, tussock and those little stabby flax's trying to find areas to hack a turn or whatever. The heli trip all came together last minute. The thought was to try and ride the backside of Cecil Peak, which is the mountain directly across the lake from Queenstown with the rock table jutting out of it. Cecil Peak is quite low and doesn't really have snow most of the time so there are not many opportunities to ride it. After a fly around Cecil with Helitours to check the amount of snow and the quality it was on. The heli day was a super nice cold day -8 at the airport where we flew from. It turned out to be real good fun terrain and the snow was as good as it gets in NZ. We did a few lines and hiked a couple of features. The days are super short here at the moment so we didn't have that much time before the shadows came in. We found one more run to do some turns on and I somehow took a beating doing a pow turn. Helitours have a thing going with another company Helispa. They heli spa pools to remote locations for people. So we had that lined up for the end of the day which was super sweet, on top of Cecil looking out over Queenstown and Lake Wakatipu with a whiskey watching the sun set. Was a pretty epic day!! Check out the new Diaries Down Under ep when its released soon.