The Cover Shot - Wild #196

Perseverance, that’s what comes to mind when I look back at this image. We were on the West Coast of New Zealand, trying to find a way to reach the summit of Mt Aurora via its east face. It’s not a prominent peak, nor a very technical one, but its west face offers a very nice ski line and that was our plan for the day.

The base of the east face is relatively steep, and the conditions at the time were very deep with a typical crust on soft snow. I was putting the track in, and it took me more than half an hour to progress 100m in the above-knee-deep snow. The rest of the group was waiting for me to be out of trouble to safely carry on. When I finally reached shallower snowpack and a lower angle slope, I threw my bag off my shoulders, looked down, and saw this could be a great shot. I had just enough time to clear snow off my camera, but my heart rate was still high and, after the effort, sweat was slowly dripping into my eyes. Somehow, I managed to hold steady though, and when Janina was the first to come up, my wide-angle lens did a perfect job.

You can see more of Tom’s imagery from this backcountry trip to NZ’s Main Divide in the accompanying feature story ‘Next Gen’ starting on p60.

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