Day (snow) trip to Holdsworth, with a twist!

By Chris Russell, 01 October 2023

So intially Kate was running a collab trip with Massey Alpine Club to mitre peak on this date and Jackson had this amazing idea, probably my favourite idea on a tramp ever, to bring his snowboard up to mitre because there was snow forecast that weekend. Because even if it wasn't snowboard-able it was just funny to take something so inconviently large to the highest peak in the Tararuas (and show MUSC how cool we are [sunglasses emoji]). However the mitre trip was cancelled and because of bad weather. But I got talking to Jack about how I'm still keen to try ride this snow, so we put up a day trip on the Sunday and headed off with a keen bunch. Part of that keen bunch was Tommy, who decided to bring some skis along! So we charged up the mountain, meanwhile getting weird looks from the people out for a quick stroll due to the snowboard and skis strapped to our packs. We got up to the tops and there was indeed snow but it was blowing about 90kmh winds, and unfortunately my snowboard acted as a little sail. This meant that the wind has so much force that I could not stand up / had to actually crawl sections of the track. Now there wasn't actually *that* much snow, the tussock was very much sticking out. Despite this me and Tommy found a small patch of snow that didn't have tussock and Tommy was the first to try ride it. Tommy did not bring ski boots, he literally just tied his tramping boots to the skis, but it kinda worked! However the skis were not great because the snow was just powder. But powder is the snowboard's specialty so I strapped on and managed to get an entire 5 metre run in before hitting a bush, which in our books was a success! And so this concluded one of those trips that was fun because it was absurd, and I loved it.