By Zade Viggers, 26 September 2026
Friday
- Jas and Gracie and Max are sick. I am to spend the whole weekend hanging out with them
- There is a new Korean Chicken place at the Bulls carpark. It's pretty good, but expensive.
- The Edge 94FM: Steamy, Freaky, Dreamy, and Creamy
- Jack forgot an entire carload of people. This resulted in us staying up until 1:30am for a leaders briefing which ended up getting moved till tomorrow anyway (tying people into chairs also contributed)
- Max and Tommy (Bolinger) sleep in matching Roman togas
Saturday
- We are woken up at the unholy hour of 8am. I am very upset about this, and feel a bit tired.
- We did snowcrafty things (avalanche theory & awareness, avalanche search & rescue techniques, ice axe use, crampon use, the four different self-aresting styles, and glissading)
- The bigwigs upstairs decided we were gonna have lunch @ the TTC lodge rather than doing packed lunches. However, there wasn't that much snow, so we had to walk for lowkey an hour to get to Baby's Cradle (the valley-ish thing we use for instruction under the NZAC lodge, between the Ampitheatre and Delta Corner, with Delta Ridge between it and the main run at the ski field), and since people didn't want to spend an extra two hours walking to and fro from the lodge we ended up staying there doing snowcrafty things till like 3pm then having a very late lunch of tacos. This meant that dinner got pushed out until like 8pm
- Dinner wasn't till like 8pm (see above for reason why). We served the protien bros plain chicken with plain rice (the rest of us had it in Thai green curry). Also there was so much chicken. SO. MUCH. CHICKEN. It was probably all factory farmed (BOOOO), but lowkey gotta get that protien somehow.
- Jack's new* "op" "insane deal" "incredible" "better than yours" boots fell apart, shedding macroplastics everywhere (*new to him - they were made fully of plastic and had been sitting in a cupboard for >20 years so we kinda all saw this coming, he was just blinded by the "deal" of paying "only $80" for them from some guy on Facebook marketplace)
- I find Barry Crumpet's A Good Keen Man in the lodge and give it a read. I was laughting histerically the whole time and got some weird looks from Gracie and Jas. I got like 2/3 of the way through the book before we left. I'll try finish it if I can find a copy in an op shop somewhere - it's quite good.
- Alan spent all afternoon hanging out (from the big metal hoop in the lodge ceiling) in his abseiling/caving/tree climbing gear. He's got some nice fancy ascenders and a very shiny new looking rack (I've never seen a rack that nice - normally they have giant dents in the bars wehre the ropes have gone over 500 times).
- Jack set up a giant cusion area for sock wrestling. Plenty of blood was drawn, oil levels checked, foot fungi transmitted, and future ACC claims created. Lots of fun though. I was 2nd to last standing in the big battle royal FFA match. Aleif held his own pretty well against Jack & various others in a couple 2v1s, but he did lose both. Jas & Max have a toe sock showdown againt each other, in celebration of getting toe socks legalised for normal play.
Sunday
- We get got up at the unholy hour of 8:30am EXCEPT PLOT TWIST it's actually 7:30 and we got half an hour less sleep because it was daylight savings and time went forward an hour overnight. I am now sick with the pluage from my co-leaders.
- The weather is terrible. It rained overnight which got rid of all the natrual snow. The artifical snow on the main slope** is mostly gone as well, just leaving dregs of slugh and occasional ice patches. It's a sad, wet, slog out. (**climate change has delt to the ski field pretty badly and it doesn't get snow most of the way down now. The lift company has build dozens and dozens of snowmaker machines to keep the main slope to the bottom of the gondala - which they went bankrupt over building and got bailed out by the govt - open since they're too poor to move the main buildings any further up the mounga because they can't sell enough ski passes because the mountain doesn't get good snow anymore because of climate change, so they're stuck just basically pumping out a single zig-zag of ice each season)
- We go to the Ohakune tip shop of the way out, and Finlay gets some old brass lamps to try and ensalve the genies in them. Jack also finds a new*** pair of boots to try and destroy (***new to him - they are from the 80s so about 40 years old this time rather than just the same age as him)
- We get some pies and suassage rolls from the Jimmy Nation choclate eclair shop in Ohakune. Their saussage rolls are only $5 and are double the normal length, which is pretty great. Max gets chips to memorialise Captian Kune's (the Ohakune fish and chip shop), which closed earlier this year (very sad: the fish and chips weren't great, and you'd see all sorts of dodgy types in there, but they were the best thing around).
- I am sleepy and sick the whole time as Max drives us back to Welly