Back into cross country skiing

I've not had much time to sort the numerous photos taken on my holiday, of landscape and sea in Fiordland. Preservation will have to wait to be blogged as skiing is on the scene and nice low temps. make for a great snow pack, [and there is a lot of it this winter].

I've been up both days over the weekend and probably logged over 30 Kms at about an average speed of 7 Km/hr and my top speed was 22.5 [for those wondering I ski with a GPS sometimes]. So all-in-all quite a good start for the season, and over the next 3 weeks I can make up my mind if I want to race in the Merino Muster again in the 21 Km category.

While New Zealand's north island is being ravaged by some of the worst storms for a decade or more, we've escaped the comparatively warm moist air these systems can bring to our delightfully cold snow pack, and instead over the weekend a number of user friendy SW to SE fronts arrived at the Snow Farm with attendant cold Antarctic air. Here we see an ice crystal rainbow out by the Bob Lee hut, on the leading edge of such a front...