Speed on Snow

SKIS came to New Zealand in the seventies with some Norwegian gold-miners. Mountaineers, such as Mannering and Dixon in the nineties Head and Earle in the early nineteen-hundreds, and Peter Graham, Milne, and Brustad in the succeeding years handed on a torch that did not kindle into a blaze until about 1930, when skiing began to capture the imagination of the young men and women who lived near the many mountains of New Zealand. Ruapehu, Egmont, Arthur’s Pass, Mount Cook, and the Otago ranges offered them their slopes for feats of exhilarating speed. National championships have been held annually since 1932, and the visits of overseas men like Mitchell, Caulfield, Wyatt, and the Skardarasies, and the return of New Zealanders like Elworthy with experience gained in Europe have done much to develop locally a high—indeed an international —standard of ski-racing. Ski-mountaineering, an early landmark in which was a winter ascent of Mount Cook in 1923, has been developed in recent years, bridging the rather artificial gap between the ski-runner and the mountaineer.