I learned to ski on a nutcracker tow at four years old. My family were club field people: every winter weekend we packed the old Subaru, chains in the boot, and drove SH73 in the dark to get first tow. My grandad made his own nutcracker out of a bit of bent steel and a bolt. It hangs over our counter now.
I spent eight winters ski patrolling, two northern seasons tuning skis in Canada, and a few years running the workshop at a ski shop in Christchurch. The same thing kept happening. People would drive an hour and a half from town with no chains, no nutcracker and no idea, get turned back at the bottom of the road, and never come back. The club fields are the best skiing in the country, and they were losing people at the car park.
So in 2019 I took over the old mechanic's workshop on the main road in Springfield (the hoist is still in the floor) and filled it with forty pairs of skis, a box of nutcrackers and a lot of chains. I named it after the Waimak, the braided river SH73 follows all the way up to Arthur's Pass. If you've driven to a club field, you've driven alongside it. We fit people the night before, make them practise on the rope we've strung up in the shop, and get them fitting chains in the yard before they need to do it in the sleet.
Six winters on, we've got about three hundred sets of gear, a 24-hour return shed and a crew of three. I still ring the fields every morning at 6:30.
— Jamie Halloran, owner
