Another blog, another injury. Well, more like another injury another blog – plenty of time to spend some quality time with a laptop. Out cutting a new line I lost concentration and slipped with a saw... Dumb and annoying as hell – it means more than a week off the bike while I wait for it to heal. It also meant I had to spend three days walking around with a splint that looked like Robocop’s cock strapped to my hand. Que sera.

Not clever.

Christmas already feels like a long way away, although for different reasons to anyone fighting through the snow to the office each day back home, I guess. Out here the tradition is the orphans’ Christmas, which comes down to mates and beer. On the big day we all piled round one mate’s house and ate until it hurt, drank until we ran dry and watched the Shawshank Redemption on the tellybox – can you ask for more at Christmas?

Boxing Day, NZ-style.

One useful tip that I wish someone had told me – the pubs close at midnight on Christmas Eve. So don’t spend the evening drinking to get yourself ready... Only to find out that everywhere is closed by the time you want to head out. We weren’t impressed, we had to drink a lot more to get over it...

Before Christmas was the Gorge Road Jump Jam here in Queenstown. Gorge Road is the jump spot in Queenstown, the photos barely do it justice – I’m no dirt jumper, but the trails look good enough for me to miss my hardtail a lot. It was a bit touch and go if the weather was going to hold, but we ended up with a great day in the sun. Some amazing riding was going down, hats off particularly to local lad, Kane who was pulling out the smoothest lines and biggest tricks all afternoon. There’s not much else to say about it really, so just enjoy Phil’s photos. You can also check out his Flickr thingy here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/14319942@N06/

Freddy Hunziker (before he smashed himself, obviously).

With the orphans’ Christmas there wasn’t much in the way of presents, but Dan at Vertigo Bikes gave me a call a week later that definitely made up for it. It was lining up to be another quiet day, when he called – “it’s your lucky day, we’ve got space on the helibiking if you can be at the shop now.” I went running.  Helibiking has been on my list of things to do since I first saw it on the early Kranked films (I think it was two – one rider was on the tigerstripe K2), it looked like the coolest thing you could do on a mountain bike. Having now done a helidrop, I still think it is.

Now that’s what I call an uplift...

Setting down at the top.

You take off from near Queenstown airport and the helicopter takes you up and across, high into the Remarkables, you descend down sweet singletrack, open rocky paths and 4x4 tracks back to valley level. In the mixed group I went up in it took us about two and a half hours to get down, although the pedal insert falling out of my cranks didn’t help much. It was very cool seeing people who’ve never ridden seriously get off their bikes at the end with huge grins on their faces. In case you think you’re too hardcore to ride a trail that novices can ride, just remember that Stevie Smith did this the week before I did and was loving it... and I’d rate this as the best thing I’ve done since I’ve been in Queenstown. Check out Vertigo’s website www.vertigobikes.co.nz for more details. I also need to say that they’re a properly good local bike shop: they’re friendly and know their stuff – they even tolerated me squatting in their workshop while I sorted my cranks out after the helibiking.

It’s just amazing to be up that high and far away from everything.

Our guide, Tom, king of all he surveys.

Not everything here involves bikes – I was lucky enough to be taken out 4x4ing one evening. I reckon this is definitely a contender for what I’ll get into when I’m too fat or injured to ride – it beats the shit out of golf. We headed out from Arrowtown up the valley to Macetown – an old gold miners’ town that died out because it was so remote. It’s slow going, 18 kilometres took us about two hours, but it’s amazing what you can drive a truck up, down and through. When dark fell it was even better, smashing through the undergrowth with the stereo on full volume and only the light from your headlights ahead of you.

Luke’s truck, she’s a bit of a beast...

Heading up the riverbed towards Macetown.

I need to finish with an apology. A big one. To Americans. How many people reading this remember when Americans were a regular feature in the World Cup top tens? The days of names like Napalm, EC, Myles Rockwell, Missy, Lopes reading like a who’s who of gravity-assisted mountain biking seem like a long time ago. Of that list only Lopes is still competitive, with Myles and Missy stuck on the wrong side of the law for what they smoked and Napalm failing to qualify for the US Olympic boardercross team last month... (If anyone knows what EC is doing these days please stick the answer on a postcard c/o Southern Downhill.) But I’m wandering off here, the point is that, with the honourable exceptions of Aaron Gwin and Mitch Ropelato, Americans are MIA as a country of racers and downhillers. I think it’s fair to say that a lot of Brits see them a bit of a joke. So when Neil said he had a yank coming to stay with him for a couple of weeks, I assumed he’d probably be fat and definitely slow.

Elliot at round one of the Nationals – he spent the weekend hitting lines that few people outside the elites were hitting, but went down on his race run.
(Photo courtesy of Neil Gardner, www.nzsnaps.com )

Apologies for the crap photos, but I had to get a photo of him hitting Big Dream.

I was wrong. On my first ride with Elliot we headed up to the Zoot Track just out of town. By the second corner down he was just gone – not even dropped, just gone. Later in the week we took him up to eyeball the Dream Track (for anyone that doesn’t know what the Dream Track is, it’s a series of 40ft+ jumps built for a NWD video some years ago). Around town you can count the number of people who hit these jumps on your fingers. One minute I was looking at a step-down with him and he was saying it was crazy. The next minute we heard the sounds of tyres on gravel and he’d launched the top double. Coming back up laughing saying that he couldn’t believe you could go that far in the air on a bike he ran up and hit it again, and then off the step-down he’d been calling crazy a few minutes earlier... It’s fair to say that I’m seriously impressed by his riding, and it’s not just the big stuff either, he couldn’t get enough of the steeper tech tracks around town. So, I apologise to all Americans for assuming you’re fat and slow (except to those of you who are). With a bit of luck we’ll get him over to the UK soon to find out just how fast he is.

(Photo courtesy of Neil Gardner, www.nzsnaps.com )

Talking to him you also realise how lucky we are in the UK to have the tracks and race scene we have. Elliot is from SoCal and there simply are no races or even good tracks out there. A couple of minutes flat out down a dusty hillside are about the best they can hope for. When he says this, you need to remember that California isn’t exactly a backwater – it has a population of nearly 40 million, which is more than the whole of Canada (New Zealand has a population of just four million)...

Matt Wragg

www.twitter.com/matt_wragg

www.accidentalracing.co.uk