For a long time after his catastrophic accident, elite mountain climber David Vass avoided looking out the windows of his Wanaka home.
Seeing the mountain scenery of Otago - the backdrop of where he'd spent much of his life climbing was too much of a "continual slap in the face".
As a way of coping, wheelchair-bound David moved away from the mountains to Christchurch. It's here he came to terms with a completely different existence of life, found healing in writing and new ways of relating with nature.
"The mountains were my tūrangawaewae [places we feel connected]," shares the 61-year-old, who had never considered a life of immobility before.
"But now they seem less or differently - meaningful.
My life is no longer shaped around them. I spend my time more engaging my mind and taking mental risks rather than physical ones now."
It was in January 2015, while returning from the Darran Mountains in a gathering storm, that a minor slip left him with incomplete tetraplegia.
He and three friends were only an hour's tramp from the car park when a little tree root broke from underneath his foot, causing David to trip and fall down a two-metre bank.
"To me, it felt like I had fallen down this huge cliff," he recalls. "I landed really heavily, straight on my head. There was a huge crunch and I just knew I had broken my neck."
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