I’d been thinking of pushing my splitboarding and the concept of a sunrise shred was appealing. What better adventure than hiking up in the night and getting to shred perfect untouched powder as the sun comes up. It had been a crazy week of intense snow and a lot of the slopes had been closed. The poor weather was start to clear and the slopes were due to open so Craig and I decided to get on it.

Starting around 7pm we parked up and ran across the slope avoiding the groomers still working and got to our start point at around 1500m altitude. Our target was the peak at 2420m. A mammoth ascent in the day let alone in darkness. We kicked off our tour and instantly realised we were in for a battle. The snow was so deep that you couldn’t take your ski’s off. If you did you were screwed. You just couldn’t get back up easily without a buddy helping you. I had a mental picture of the route with a Garmin GPS and a traditional compass with pre-set bearings to follow.

The moon was full which created a surreal atmosphere in the trees where you could see pretty surprisingly well. With the snow being so deep every step was becoming a battle. We traded breaking trail but after some 3hrs of constant effort we looked to settle in for the night and call it quits. We managed to climb to around 2000m and dug in our base camp for our bivi’s and settled in for a night looking at the stars and being excited for the morning. The only downside was -15c temps. It was frigging cold. We learnt about making a hot water bottle for future missions.

We woke up mega early to some all time snow. Almost too much snow. We got some sweet shots and shredding back to civilisation. The funny thing was it took longer to de-ice the car than ride down. Once that was done it was off to McDonalds for a much needed double serving of breakfast.