From broken back to spinning a 360 in a sit ski
Ski patrollers hustle around him. Paramedics collect themselves for the task at hand. Quick, sharp voices direct and demand the next moves. Fear in his family’s eyes, wiped away by a duty to be strong.
“It was pretty hectic from the outside looking in,” Jack Howatson says.
“But from the inside looking out, it was more peaceful than anything. Really, it was one of the most peaceful experiences of my life. I thought whatever happens, everything’s gonna be fine.”*
He’d just ruptured his spinal cord snowboarding. It was 2017.
*(“There were no drugs at that point too, which is crazy,” he added).
Jack’s home is the outdoors. He grew up in New Plymouth, where his family ran a goat farm. Almost every weekend during winter, he’d be up among the clouds snowboarding at Ruapheu. He learned to surf in the frisky waters of North Taranaki Bight. He’d be spinning daily on his mountain bike.
A broken back was never going to keep him away from his home.
Transferred to Christchurch’s Burwood Hospital, he celebrated his 18th birthday in the rehabilitation unit.
“It was months and months of just lying down. You’re in so much agony. You’re on super, super crazy pain killers and your mind is pretty hazy,” Jack says. “I had to just take it one day at a time.”
About 900 days later, in 2021, Jack was back claiming his space in Aotearoa’s adventure capital, Queenstown. “It’s so much fun to be back,” he says.
He’s surrounded himself with a like-minded community… at the bike park and on the ski fields.
“Everyone was saying hello, I was making heaps of mates that way and anyone is keen to make anything work, you know?” he says. “I think when people see me do all these crazy sports, well, everyone just wants to stoke together.”
His specially designed mountain bike - a Bowhead - and sit ski are the key to getting on the slopes and trails.
“Anywhere there’s a chairlift, you can get to on a sit ski,” he says. “You can go as hard as you want, it’s all just skill. The equipment doesn’t hold you back. You can do anything, which is crazy.”
Last season, he lent his body to off-piste skiing, shooting through chutes, gliding, rocking, and bouncing down gnarlier untouched terrain.
He’d previously had only a few lessons on the sit-ski, and then he was left to his own devices. Now he’s casually just flying over the XL jumps at Cadrona Ski Field.
“The hardest thing is just getting on and off the lift,” Jack says with a little chuckle.
Although the bike can be a little bit more restrictive, he’s making it work for him. And he’s ridden four of Queenstown’s most difficult mountain bike trails. Previous Queenstown’s iFLY general manager Allen Sparks, a “mad mountain biker,” Jacks says, first took him up the tracks in Coronet Peak to show him around.
“If you’re willing to give it a go and you’ve got good people around you to kind of help you down the trails, you can go down pretty much anything,” Jack shares.
“And everyone in Queestown is just pushing you as much as they can. They’re like, ‘We should go down this crazy trail. We should go down this one, and this one.’ Everyone’s just hyping you up, so you believe it, and you do it.”
After exploring the trails, Jack has been slowly crafting an online guidebook of the tracks, explaining the best hacks for cruising down the mountain for adaptive bikers.
“It’s just trial and error, you’re just testing stuff out for yourself. As long as you’re listening to your instincts and listening to your body, everything should be sweet,” he says.
Although he’s had to sometimes check in and pull back on his biking, hitting the limits of what he and his bike could handle, he’s just happy to be here. He’s been to some unreal spots camping on the bike, he says.
“Every day I’m reminding myself to be grateful that I get to just be outside, and I’m frothing on that, regardless of what trail I’m going down.”
“Not everyone gets to experience this stuff, you know? So you just have to be grateful for that side of things, and that keeps you happy. If you’re like, ‘I can’t do this, I can’t do this,’ then you’re always in a rut, you know? And it’s just no good for anyone.”
He’s working hard to be “full-time fun,” encouraging the world to get out and have an adventure.
And his mission is catching.
“I was up Coronet biking and these six little kids bound out of a car, like, ‘oh yo, I’ve seen you, we’ve seen you on TikTok. What happens if you crash? What if this or that happens?” Jack says.
“They’re asking me all these questions, and then one of the kids just turns to all the others and he’s like, ‘guys, he just gets a mate to help him.’”
Throughout his whole recovery, up until today and onwards into tomorrow, Jack says it’s been the support of his family, friends, and strangers which means everything - the people who believe in him, who tell him he can do anything.
“It’s always been about who you surround yourself with,” he says. “People around you saying you can do it, and then you’re like, ‘holy shit, yeah, I can’ and then you go do it, and it’s amazing.”
He recently met with a local teenager who had broken her back. “Hopefully I’m helping get people outside, getting them thinking about what they could be doing,” he says.
“Get outside, it’s pretty nice,” is a slogan he likes to share.
I asked Jack about the bad days.
He doesn’t have them often, he says. He keeps busy. He tries not to internalise his thoughts. He keeps it simple. Positive.
When he saw someone on the internet riding a skateboard on a wheelchair, he thought, ‘Holy shit, I can probably do that.’ Next thing, his mate welds some brackets onto his board, and then he’s off, skating down the Queenstown streets. “Yeahhh boyyy!” people would encourage him as he hits town from the heights of Fernhill.
“It’s definitely pretty sketchy and you’ve got to be mindful of where you skate,” he says. “I’ve fallen off a few times, but someone’s always been there to give me a hand, put me back on the board, and then I’ve kept going.”
He’s also jumped out of a plane.
After the team at iFLY Indoor Skydiving said he could probably try skydiving outdoors, with absolutely no doubt that he could do it…he did.
There may have been a broken leg involved during a landing back in May 2022, but it’s mostly the costs of the sport holding him back now, he says.
Temperatures are dropping now in New Zealand’s deep south. The favourite white powder of the snow community is lining up along the mountain tops.
Jack is dusting off his sit-ski.
He’s wearing a ‘Black Crow’ beanie during our chat - his ski adventures this year sponsored by the French company. Another group of people believing in him.
“My plan this winter is to just have heaps of fun. Ski as much as I can. I really wanna do a 360 this year, that’s the big crazy thing I wanna do.”
He’s always dreaming big. Bikepacking the world. Skiing in Canada. “As long as you’re stoking, as long as you’re trying to get outside, trying to do what makes you happy. That’s what I’m all about,” he says.
“There are just so many possibilities.”