WANAKA, New Zealand — From the bottom, they look like butterflies, dropping soundlessly into the halfpipe and soaring high above its walls, spinning and flipping, flashes of color cascading over the whiteness. It’s only after they skid to a stop and lift their bug-eyed goggles that you see the dreadlocks and soul patches, the Rockstar and Monster energy-drink logos, the tie-dye slickers and the ubiquitous ear buds.

Snowboarders remain locked in their heads as they compete to their personal soundtracks. Shredders are big on lifestyle and community, but on this beautiful and remote halfpipe, they are focused and withdrawn.

Every August, the world’s best snowboarders come to work on big-air and physics-defying tricks in this tiny town hidden by mountains and surrounded by sheep. The athletes flock here for one reason: Wanaka has the only Olympic-size halfpipe open anywhere in the world at that time of year.

That means, especially heading into an Olympic year, Wanaka becomes a ground zero of aerial somersaults and 360-degree flips that is unlike anything else on the planet.

Photo

“We’re a community, and there’s a lot of support, no matter what your country,” said Gretchen Bleiler, who won a silver medal for the United States at the 2006 Turin Games. “But I’m not going to lie: there’s a lot more intensity than usual.”

Days begin in the predawn darkness with athletes boarding vans for the one-hour ride up the mountain.

By noon, they are back in town and in the gym, keenly aware that the friends they are training with are also their competitors.

“It’s like ‘Groundhog Day,’ ” said J. J. Thomas, a United States bronze medalist in 2002 at the Salt Lake Games. “We do the same thing over and over.”

But in Wanaka, the days are broken up with field trips to settings so stunning they belong in a snow globe. It’s a place for camaraderie, where riders from Norway and Russia, Spain and Japan share a playground in the afternoon and, often, a Speight’s beer at night in the local pubs.

But it is also a place of fierce competition and heightened tension. The Winter Olympics, after all, are coming in February, and there are more exceptional halfpipe riders than there are spots in Sochi, Russia.

For all the natural beauty, the halfpipe is clearly the main attraction. It’s where the freestyle creed of all fun and no fear is exposed as a lie. It’s where an over-rotated hip or turned-out foot can scramble your brains or compress your spine.

When the pipe gets noisy, everyone here knows it means something went terribly wrong. Crashes occurred most mornings: shoulders were separated, bruises counted and stitches pulled through. Sometimes, it was much worse.

One morning, with the sunshine lending the mountain a rouge halo and fresh snow plumped into what looked like a comfortable pillow, the halfpipe got loud. It began with a collective groan and sickening thwack as Luke Mitrani, an American, fell 40 feet from the sky and landed square on his back as if he were shot out of a cannon.

Next came blasts of crunching ice as coaches, teammates and medical personnel dropped to their knees and slid into the pipe to reach Mitrani near the bottom. No one floated down it and into the air. Goggles were up and ear buds out as the world’s best snowboarders waited for Mitrani to turn a foot or raise a finger.

He was perfectly still.

The riders were out of their own heads now. A few made their way down to take a look before sliding to the bottom of the mountain. No one felt like training anymore. Most looked away when the snowmobile arrived and Mitrani was gently put on the stretcher it was dragging. Soon, a helicopter arrived. Mitrani, 23, was loaded aboard for a two-hour flight to Christchurch.

Welcome to Middle-Earth

This is no country for the vertiginous. Narrow roads with hairpin switchbacks vein the Southern Alps, the name given to this mountain range on New Zealand’s South Island by the British explorer James Cook in 1770. There are no guardrails, and members of the United States team barely look at the sheer cliffs and heart-swallowing drops outside the van. Many of them have been visiting for more than a decade, but it’s hard getting used to these white-knuckle drives.

To relieve the tedium of training, the snowboarders turned their August afternoons into an extreme summer camp meets international mixer, scattering to the four corners of Middle-earth — or at least the cinematic stand-in for J. R. R. Tolkien^[3]’s fictional universe. The enchanted rain forests, geothermal^[4] pools and ethereal glaciers made this a natural stage for the native son Peter Jackson and his “Lord of the Rings” trilogy, as well as an irresistible playground for the shredder set.

On the American team, Arielle Gold, 17, and her brother Taylor, 19, went sky diving. Louie Vito is a veteran bungee jumper here, and Elena Hight has kayaked and paraglided on Lake Wanaka.

Another of their teammates, Kelly Clark^[5], who is atop the women’s halfpipe world rankings, went horseback riding with two women from the Swiss team. The Canadian team went surfing and watched the penguins three hours away near Dunedin. Thomas was on a golf course with Kim-Rune Hansen of Norway, something that became a daily date.

One day, Vito, 25, and Hight, 24, commandeered the American vans and led an expedition down the mountain to Queenstown for a day of skateboarding, Frisbee golf and a visit to a haunted house so frightening that 870 people had been unable to make it all the way through over a nine-week period. Vito and Hight have been here every August since they were 13 – and recognize New Zealand’s contributions to their sport.

Beyond the fact that the country offered them a winter wonderland in the dog days of August, they appreciated that a laid-back rebel spirit was intact in a way that had eluded the mountain towns in America, with their resort riches and crush of sponsors. Skiers and boarders hitchhiked up the mountain or stood upright in flatbed trailers pulled by pickups to reach the Cardrona Alpine Resort. At the end of the day, at the bottom of the mountain, the police frequently set up checkpoints and wielded Breathalyzers to ensure motorists arrived home safely.

Photo Snowboarders from throughout the world flock to New Zealand to take advantage of the halfpipe at Cardrona Alpine Resort. Credit Andrew Quilty for The New York Times

Snow Park, across the road from the resort, was closed this year but is iconic among the shredder cognoscenti. In 2002, it proclaimed itself the “first dedicated freestyle terrain park in the world” and installed halfpipes, jumps and rails. It remains a featured location in reams of videos and YouTube clips as well as the big-air film “That’s It That’s All.”

Every influential snowboarder — like Craig Kelly, the godfather of free-riding; Terje Hakonsen, a dominant Norwegian; and Shaun White^[6] — has come through New Zealand in August. Vito and Hight want to be counted among them.

They are mid-career athletes in a sport in which careers have an unpredictable shelf life. Everyone wants to be a free spirit, but free spirits rarely win gold medals. It’s hard to act nonchalant when much of your time is spent gripping your board logo side up, donning your Red Bull cap and hitting your talking points.

“You either step back, or step up and embrace that snowboarding has evolved from a lifestyle to a competitive sport,” Clark said.

Clark, 30, captured a gold medal in the 2002 Salt Lake Games, then finished fourth in 2006 in Turin, Italy. She won bronze in the Vancouver Games in 2010 after rededicating herself to her training.

Thomas won bronze in the men’s halfpipe in Salt Lake City, but he chose a different path, closer to the sport’s roots — starring in videos and magazine spreads known as “snowboard porn.”

The film track can be lucrative and offers little of the stress of elite competition, and plenty of adventure and camaraderie.

But Thomas returned to competition and now coaches Vito and Bleiler, who took silver in Turin. He took his golf clubs rather than his snowboard, a page definitely turned.

Vito, on the other hand, has gone all-in for an assault on Sochi after finishing a disappointing fifth at Vancouver.

Vito is one of the national team’s more charismatic leaders, eager to share advice and his wide-ranging opinions with younger riders.

Four years ago during the run-up to the Olympics, he was a contestant on “Dancing With the Stars.” He loved it.

But it may have compromised his medal chances, and it forced him to take a hard look at his priorities. Vito decided he wanted to win, so he sought out John Schaeffer, the trainer of the short-track skater Apolo Ohno, the most decorated American Winter Olympic medalist. The partnership has worked. Schaeffer has helped sculpture Vito’s 5-foot-5 frame into something as hard as a piece of steel and supple as a switch of leather.

But other changes have helped, too: Vito has quit drinking and partying, trading in beers with his teammates for juice. And he is all too aware of his sport’s dangers.

On New Year’s Eve 2009, he was training in Park City, Utah, when his friend Kevin Pearce struck his head on the halfpipe and was critically injured. Two years later, on the same pipe, the Canadian freestyle skier Sarah Burke took a nasty fall. Ten days later, she was dead.

“It opened my eyes even more that snowboarding can be taken away in the blink of an eye,” Vito said. “I have a short window to be the best that I can.”

He added: “There’s boarders more naturally talented than me, but none is going to work harder. I want to be able to look back and know I did everything in my power to be the best.”

Nervous Day at Benny’s

The sun had yet to peek down on Benny’s Cafe, and the smell of scones mixed with the whir of the steamer. Snowboards were on the counter, as they had been since 1 a.m. when Ryan McDermott, a dreadlocked American who runs the shop, declared them tuned and waxed and called it a night.

With its plywood skateboard ramp out front and snowboard-themed, goofy golf tract in back, Benny’s is where snowboarders go to relax in the shadow of the mountain. Its owner, Benny Bright, is the coach and brother of Torah Bright, an Australian snowboarder who won a gold medal in the Vancouver Games. He teamed with Otis Lynch, a gifted local chef from a long line of successful restaurateurs, and asked McDermott to run his board shop.

Photo Hight played disc golf with members of the American snowboard team in Wanaka. Credit Andrew Quilty for The New York Times

“I wanted a monument built to a lifestyle worth living,” he said.

But on this day, Mitrani’s accident hung over Benny’s like the morning fog. It was an all-too-real reminder of how dangerous snowboarding can be when someone tries to do something remarkable.

“It’s a C-5,” Vito said, naming the vertebrae that was broken, “and the surgery went well.”

Soon, Vito and the others were up the mountain, flying through the air and working on their own harrowing tricks.

“He’ll be O.K.,” Hight said, hoping that was so.

Mitrani made the United States snowboard team at age 12, the youngest person to do so. He was coming off a strong year and looking to make his first Olympic team.

Now his teammates waited to hear about his fate.

Bar Keeps Rising

Hight grew up watching DVDs of competitions where guys snowboarded with a beer in hand. She knew people who would drink late into the night and show up at events the next day looking as if they had been marinated in a keg.

But in recent years, the jumps got higher, the tricks got more complicated, and the sport became more professional. With that, the night-life component of the sport’s lifestyle faded.

“The party-rebel scene still exists; you just have to be more tactical,” Hight said. “You are taking so much risk that you want to be on it when you’re out here. You can’t afford to be hung over on the hill and doing double corks.”

As the sun rose above the halfpipe in August, no one was groggy. The Japanese team stayed together at the bottom of the pipe, miming the moves the snowboarders would try on the 22-foot pipe. The Russians huddled as well.

Arthur Longo of France and Queralt Castellet of Spain worked solo and in furious bursts. Both are climbing the rankings and commanding their peers’ attention on practice runs.

White was one of the few top snowboarders not at Wanaka, but his presence was palpable just the same. He is perhaps the best-known action athlete in the world, a multimillionaire brand gunning for his third gold medal.

White is the man everyone wants to beat, but rarely has.

For all its carefree charms, a month in the Southern Alps during an Olympic year is hardly a summer vacation. Clark looked into the pipe from its lip and saw some of the sport’s finest “cramming for a test.”

Hight’s view was even narrower. She saw eight teammates, friends really, whom she travels with and confides in 10 months a year. But there are just four berths on the women’s United States Olympic snowboarding team, which will not be decided until weeks before the Sochi Olympics.

Do the math: it’s a calculus for frayed nerves.

“Almost all the best riders are American,” Hight said. “There are girls here from other countries who already know they are going to the Olympics. In a lot of ways, making the team is more stressful and difficult than the Olympics themselves will be.”

Photo Louie Vito at practice. Credit Andrew Quilty for The New York Times

She is trying to make her third Olympic team. Hight wants to add a triumphant chapter to a career that has been precocious but disappointing. In 2003, she was 13 and became the first woman to land a 900, or a two-and-a-half-full-rotation spin, in competition. At 16, she surprised everyone, herself most of all, by making the Olympic team and finishing a respectable sixth at Turin.

She was supposed to be the next big thing. Instead, there were a hip injury and multiple concussions — she has had at least 10. Four years ago, Hight was the last rider to qualify for the American team and was hardly surprised when she finished 10th.

“In Italy, I was totally overwhelmed by the experience; I was just a kid having fun,” she said. “In Vancouver, I was barely keeping up. I wasn’t on top of my game.”

The next summer, she was burned out. She hated her vagabond life. So she took the summer off, surfed, worked on an online business degree and even designed a six-piece clothing collection. It was rewarding. It was soul soothing. But it made her want to return to the mountain.

In 2012, Hight took gold at the grand prix at Mammoth Mountain in California and at the Burton United States Open^[7] Snowboard Championships in Stratton, Vt. This year, Hight showed she still had the creativity and athleticism to push the boundaries of the sport. At the Winter X Games in Aspen, Colo., she became the first person to land a double backside alley-oop rodeo, a trick so complicated that White, who has been working on it, was not convinced Hight had hit it until he saw the videotape. He has yet to land it in a competition.

Hight said a few other women were working on the trick, but she did not display the move here. She has landed it about a dozen times and is confident she can throw it at will. She also knows how dangerous it is; she trains in winter with an air bag.

“It’s terrifying,” she said. “I don’t claim to be fearless. We feed off the fear, and it’s the balance between that and the adrenaline that gives us the passion for the sport. It’s a great feeling when you do something that you didn’t think was possible.”

Mending at Home

There will be no Olympics for Mitrani in 2014 or probably ever. He was placed in a neck brace for 12 weeks, probably longer, so the bone could fuse. He says he is fortunate he can walk.

Mitrani cannot talk about the accident without his heart racing and his voice quivering. He was in the midst of a front double cork 1080, a trick he had done countless times, when he realized he had overshot it and was going to land too far down the halfpipe. He opened himself up to prevent the second flip and landed like a lead Frisbee on his back.

“It felt like everything stopped,” he said by phone from his home in California after two weeks in a New Zealand hospital bed. “I didn’t know if I was dying or what was happening. I couldn’t feel anything in my body.”

The helicopter ride to the hospital was, he said, the “loneliest two hours of my life.” Mitrani was by himself. He thought he felt a vibration in his body but was convinced that he was paralyzed. With his coaches driving to Christchurch, he spent the initial hours at the hospital with no one to interpret what the doctors were telling him.

“I knew I needed surgery,” he said. “They said there was a chance I’d be paralyzed.”

When he came out of surgery, the vibration remained. Mitrani was assured that it had gone well and he would walk again, but he refused to sleep for two days.

“I was too scared to let go,” he said. “I was convinced that I would wake up paralyzed.”

Mitrani has no idea what is ahead of him. He is not sure what to make of the life that he has left behind. Alone in the helicopter, he said, he discovered one thing that was true.

“We think so many things are so important that are not,” he said. “Your family and friends are what matters. I wanted to live even if I was paralyzed. For me to lose a life for that isn’t worth it.”

Mitrani recently bought a home in California and will be spending a lot of time there over the coming year. It will be eight months to a year before he can do even modest physical therapy. He has been told to expect a full recovery, but whether that means a return to snowboarding, competitively or otherwise, remains to be seen.

“I’ve never been still for this long,” he said. “I’ll be doing a lot of thinking.”

He sounded relieved.

References

1. ^{^} Continue reading the main story (www.nytimes.com)
2. ^{^} Watch in Times Video » (www.nytimes.com)
3. ^{^} More articles about J. R. R. Tolkien. (topics.nytimes.com)
4. ^{^} Recent and archival news about geothermal power. (topics.nytimes.com)
5. ^{^} More articles about Kelly Clark. (2010games.nytimes.com)
6. ^{^} More articles about Shaun White. (2010games.nytimes.com)
7. ^{^} More articles about the U.S. Open (Golf). (topics.nytimes.com)