No words for now, Alain is tired. I'll leave you with this for the time being 
:
<![CDATA[<p><a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/WkIOMcWVq8w">http://www.youtube.com/v/WkIOMcWVq8w</a></p>]]>
View original media here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WkIOMcWVq8w
I do love the way YouTube takes a perfectly good video and knackers the quality. I'll put the original up tomorrow.
[Edit: Now I've had time to think about it all]
I think the vid pretty much tells the story itself, but anyway I'll chuck a few words together. There's a load of photos over here too. So that's it, 60cm of fresh in a couple of days, the one I was sure would happen some time this season. Funny that it fell 6 days into Spring though. With conditions like that I had to give them a call, but no cat/heli combo going on at Mt Potts this season, but "we do have a space on Thursday's heli trip!". 5 minutes of thinking and Sloth was back on the phone, booking that one right in.
Very very early start, up at 5am and in Rosie, down south, then inland towards Mt Somers. Long, long, perfectly straight roads, sun coming up over the snow-covered mountains ahead. Now what I wasn't expecting were the suicidal ducks, wandering across the road in this area. What's that all about? Mt Somers is about 10 houses by the looks of it; from there it's on the gravel roads deep into the backcountry. I'd been told that if you feel as though you were lost, you were almost there. They're not wrong, this place is right out in the back of beyond. Scenery just incredible, the last bit took me ages cos I kept stopping to take pics. Check this out at Lake Clearwater:
Nice and chilled on arrival at the lodge, not getting going for another hour or so. Met everyone else, 2 groups for the day, including one of the owners. Ok, admittedly the others could've been better, just a bunch of annoying aussie dickheads, but they were from Canberra, so you almost felt sorry for them.
After safety briefing, in came the heli, straight to the front of the lodge, then got in and flew across the riverbed to the white stuff. Nobody had been up riding it since the last storm, so completely untracked pow everywhere. Loads of it, light, fluffy, spraying up in the face. Get in! 5 runs later (and lunch on the snow) it was all over and back to the lodge. Damn these missions go so quickly. Seriously, if I had the money I'd be up there doing 10 runs a day. Nothing like it. If you get the chance, do it, don't question it, heli trips rock. If any of you lot get yourselves over to NZ, we're going back to Mt Potts, it's the schnitzel.
Time for a random big salmon?
