Skier rescues sheep, and the world delights again and again and again
A photo of Kiwi skier Pete Oswald rescuing a sheep from high up on a snowy mountain has been circulating on social media for 10 years now.
“It pops up every few months,” Oswald said yesterday from his Queenstown home.
Friends sometimes alerted him when it surged again.
Oswald, a one-time professional skier, made no money from the decade of attention.
If he got a penny every time it caught somebody’s attention, he’d be wealthy, Oswald reckoned. Photographer Dan Power made a few bob.
On August 31, 2014, Oswald, Power and a pilot from Southern Lakes Heliski were in the Hector Mountains near Kingston, Otago, for a ski magazine photo shoot.
Oswald noticed a “little bundle of wool” had tumbled down the mountain. He skied over and discovered an exhausted and slightly bloody sheep.
It probably would not have survived if the men did nothing.
Oswald hefted the 40kg animal into his arms and skied it down the mountain. Powers took the famous photos.
It was a good run, many hundreds of metres, until he found a grassy area.
The pilot would not allow the animal into his chopper.
It wandered off, unperturbed by its rare journey.
Oswald’s father, a one-time Marlborough sheep farmer, thought the animal had been missed in a muster and possibly been in the high country all winter. It was tagged but not shorn.
Power’s images and Oswald’s story spread across the word. They were published in the Mirror, a UK tabloid, the Daily Mail Australia, and in numerous New Zealand publications.
The Press put their story on the front page that September.
Oswald had moved on.
Now 38, his pro skiing days were over and he had two preschool kids. He and partner Sophie created Little Difference, a greeting card, prints and calendar company. She was the artist, he did the admin.
The company operated a 1 Card = 1 Tree programme, where every product sold leads to a native tree being planted in Madagascar and New Zealand. Over 210,000 trees had been planted so far.
By day, Oswald eliminated wilding pines in Otago.