Bio

Comment Share Posted on Tuesday May 5th at 9:18 a.m. Tweet

All righty then, this will contain the more interesting snippets from my life including;

crater lake avalanches, the 1992 winter olympic games, frozen snow cave survival stories, skiing at 201km/hr and being the ultimate (but now more sedate) ski bum.

You know, telling you all about my life could get incredibly boring.  For the much part, everyone's life is boring. It is those exciting times that, through a huge amount of planning and hard work, or just the intervention of fate, dominate our memories and make a good story to tell the grand-children.

• Born 1964 at the Mercy in Epsom.  Yes, I'm really that old, just call me Uncle Scotty.
• Grew up in Titirangi, that's right, I was a Bogan, Westy JAFA.
• Skied since three although in those days cable bindings and leather boots were vogue so started regularly in the early '70's. Thrived in the club atmosphere of Ruapehu Ski Club. It was my escape from a crappy time at school.
• Competed to National "B" team level in Mammoth Mtn in '82, Eastern Canada in '84, The Nor-ams in '85 and Yugoslavia in '86. Got up to rank 5th in NZ at the time.  With no clear path to compete in the Olympics I retired from 'gatecrashing' in 1986.
• In 1986 I discovered Speed Skiing. For six years I worked as an urgent courier, barman, ski mechanic and ....of all things, a Quantity Surveyer to pay for my additction.
• I Learned to snowboard on a Crazy Banana board in '90 & '91, taught by John Malcolm-Smith. One week each year in brilliant conditions on 5 metres of elephant snot.
• In 1992 I was proud to compete with Hugh Grierson, Mike Brook-Jones (formally Gay... no really, that was his surname), Mike Wallis, Ricky and Lisa Powell in the Winter Olympic Games at Albertville.  I came a respectable 33rd. It was a privelidge to be there for NZ.  The NZ Olympic committee to this day is the only national Olympic Committee in the world that does not recognise the athletes competing in the demostration sport of Speed Skiing in 1992 to be Olympians. We were 100% self-funded, did not gain entry to the Olympic Village and ended up sleeping in our car in -10 degrees for a number of nights prior to the event. True Grit - the kiwi way.
• Returned to work as a ski instructor at Turoa, then a patroller at Whakapapa in 1992 & 1993.  I eventually qualified to the level of; Fully Qualified Ski Patroller, ISIA Ski Instructor and Level Two Snowboard Instructor.  I wrote the first 'Snowboard Friendly Guide' for Whakapapa. In June of 1991 Mt Pinatubo blew and this had a profound effect on our season in 1992.  We ended up doing more digging hours than teaching hours, we saw the sun seven times in nine weeks. A certain ski school manager gave all of my request private lessons to his girl friend and then had me fail the ski instruction stage one exam for unprofessional conduct for bringing it up with him. Then in the spring of 1992 I got the opportunity to guide some ski models and a photographer up the Pinnacles, headwall and other peaks of Ruapehu for two days.  To cut a long story short ski model, Larry and I caused an avalanche that depositied us into the crater lake.  Surprisingly, swimming with ski boots on is not difficult with tha much adrenaline in your system. I'm really glad that Larry was a good swimmer.
• 1994 & 1995 I sat, and passed with distinction the CPIT Ski Area Managment Course, writing my thesis on "Using the Internet as a Marketing and Communication Tool".  During the course I attended work experience at Mt Hutt, Porters & Cheeseman and then worked full time as Rainbow's first ever snowboard instructor.  During this work experience I participated in a routine morning avalanche control mission at Porters. Sam, my partner for the morning got the fright of his life when the whole Bluff's area let go, 2.4km long and 1.2m deep.  I swept me off my safe spot and I will never forget Sam's face as I surfaces while passing him and just had time to say "Save me Sam" before being sucked under again.  I survived a 200m tumble before exiting under a rock with 7kg of primed powerjel in my pack. That slide destroyed the beginners platter, a chip van and the corner of the ticket office (which was built like a bunker for just these occurances).
• Later that year I created Snowco (then called nzski) by hand-coding HTML on Word Perfect for DOS on a 386 machine.  In 1995 there were only 18,957 websites in the world. A letter on endorsement was required from the New Zealand Snow Sports Council to allow me to register the domain name nzski.co.nz & snow.co.nz at the time as they were generic, and not company names.
• 1996 I build Whakapapa's first website. During winter I worked as a Patroller at Rainbow and continued to build the now renamed Snowco. This was the first year that a ski areas filled in their snow reports on our database to be displayed on Snowco.
• 1997 - 2008 I hired Martyn Davies now of SnowTV. Martyn and I lead the way with the first webcams, filming of events for the web, mobile satellite broadband & live streamming ot the web of events.  Since 2004 I have been writing Scotty Comments comentary on New Zealalnd Snow Sports every morning during the winter months.  I am now a trained photographer and have shot a number of events during the past three seasons.
• Now: I am now based in Christchurch and my wife and I now enjoying introducing my kids to the snow as often as is possible.