Q’town’s champion trailblazer

• Published date: 26 January 2023
• Publication title: Mountain Scene

Former Englishman Tom Hey, who builds and maintains some of the world’s top slopestyle courses, first picked up a shovel when he was 15 or 16 in his hometown of York

He’d earlier got hooked on riding after a mate invited him to try it out after school one day.

York being ‘‘really flat’’, he says ‘‘if you wanted to ride in the week, we had to build our own jumps’’.

‘‘It’s kind of how we learnt.’’

In the weekend, his parents would drive him an hour away to ‘‘the closest place to ride’’.

A ski season in the French Alps, when he was 18, left a lasting impression.

‘‘I was just blown away, like, why am I living in England when there’s places like this?’’

In 2004, he moved to the mountain bike mecca of Whistler, in Canada.

That first summer he worked with a crew rebuilding jumps in the village — ‘‘kind of a similar thing to [Queenstown’s] Gorge Road Jump Park’’.

He worked on the bike park, then met the person who built the slopestyle course for the international Crankworx event and started working for him.

During winters he’d work in a supermarket deli, but by year three he started coming to Queenstown during the off-season.

Hey then moved permanently here about 2010, when he met a Gore lass who’s now his fiancee.

For two years he worked for Vertigo Bikes and was also a landscaper.

As he’d shown an interest in track-building, then-Queenstown Mountain Bike Club president Lance Brown invited him to get involved.

Hey started the club’s Wednesday working bees, which run till this day, and also served a stint as club president.

‘‘I kind of had a plan to link all the trails, so I drew up a 10-year plan, went to Department of Conservation and council and they were like, ‘yep, just tick them off one by one’, and that’s how we started doing it.

‘‘Lots of tracks got done, some still haven’t been, but some which weren’t on the plan happened, too.’’

However, he recognised some tracks...