This is Scotty Dagg coming to you live from Ushuaia. Today we had an early start, breakfast with the team in the hotel and on the bus by 7.45. We are sharing the bus with the Russian interski team and they are great bunch! Our bus was the slowest bus due to a mechanical fault. It was frustrating watching every other bus pass us on the way to the mountain.
the morning bus trip to the ski area
After a 26km journey from Ushuaia around the coast and up the valley, we arrived at Cerro Castro. “WOW” what a great looking place, a lot of work has gone into making this venue one to remember.
Every team we met was excited to get on the demo slope for a practice and I ran into a lot of folk from past interski congresses, and many with kiwi connections, either from working down there or knowing someone that has. There will be some great networking done this week.
Here’s some facts about the resort. Cerro Castor has 5 chairlifts and 3 surface lifts. The skiing starts at 195 meters above sea level and the vertical gain is 862 meters. The tree line sits about half way up the mountain so the upper skiing/riding is quite exposed.
We trained our first demo run with the whole team and perfected this for the opening show. The demo hill is in great condition, if you like it bullet proof. I think it was more suited for a world cup race. I was glad we had a camp at Treble Cone that involved some combat training as that proved to be very useful. We explored the mountain after demo training and found some more very hard ice to have fun on.
top of the demo hill
We skied on the demo hill in the opening at 2pm, it was crazy fun, Greg from the tele division and the SBINZ boys joined in for that run. I think we have performed very well; this is definitely the strongest skiing team that I have been to interski with. What a great moment. We were a bit out of sync but we skied fast and had good ski performance. Other teams had better sync but skied slower than us. We as a team were ok with this because we want to show case performance skiing.
The whole team then watched a show from the Argentinians on the demo hill. This was part of the opening ceremony. It was awesome to see the South American flair at work – blaring music and a good ski show. They showed us the progression of skiing in Argentina from the early wooden skis to now. We have it easy nowadays on the new equipment… it does most of the work.
watching the show
We are about to go and attended a opening of the 2015 interski at the congress centre, we have to be there by 7 pm so I’ll let the other team members fill you in on how this goes, then we are off to another venue for the opening party. We will sample some of the local beers so as to not offend the hosts, but not too many as we have a big week ahead for our whole team. We are all going to dinner as a team which has proven to be a few laughs. We are going to different restaurants each night to make sure that we get a chance to sample all of the fine food that Ushuaia has to offer. So that’s it from me for now, we are out and about networking…….. Adios