I did it!!!! My one real goal this year, and I finally did it!

It got to about 3:30 and Cris decided to take his leave, with his friends, so Alannah and I were deciding what to do for our last run, we headed up the top T-bar (where else would yo go) - and When we got there she said "Which way should we go?" (meaning left or right) - and I thought about it for a bit, and said "Up." Initially we were just gonna go a few hundred metres, just to get some of the nice untracked snow up there. A few hundred metres turned into "We'll hike till 4 and see how far we get", then 4 o clock rolled around, and we were like ".......50 more steps!" - and they came and went, and we did 50 more, and 50 more...... Well by this stage it was clear that to strap in and ride down from anywhere less than the summit would be cheating ourselves, and although we were only about 1/4 of the way up by now, we just kept going and going....

50 minutes later and we made it!!!!! I've been told it's a 1.5 hour hike. It was the most incredible thing I've ever done with snowboarding!

It's nothing like I expected up there. The summit plateau is BIG- and the lake is silver! It's so strange to think that the lake doesn't really have a bottom.... It's strange to stand there and stare into the mouth of an active volcano, that just 2 weeks ago was threatening to throw its toys....

Eventually we had to ride back down, although I could have stayed there untill it got dark.. We strapped in, and I had the HUGEST run of my life!! The altitude meant that the snow was drier the higher we got, so the first part was pure heaven! I was on my Japan board, which is oh-so- fast, and we had SO MUCH ROOM! It was close to 5pm by the time we dropped in, and we were the only people there! We literally had all that snow to ourselves! We were all over it too- pushing out so far to the sides, laying back HUUUUGE turns, then dropping sections straight and then craaaanking on an edge and slingshot-ing around.... Oh man it was unreal!!! Most of my big runs to date have been snowboard in, hike out, so you know what's coming up, but this time we'd done all the hard work and all we had to do was just enjoy it! And we did! If you ride at Ruapehu and haven't yet hiked the summit, DOOO IT!

 

No cameras, all we had was Lana's phone cam (which is less than ideal)

 

 

 

 

Aaaand here's my graphical synopsis:

 

 

3927 feet of vertical right there!!!