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Ski Resorts In New Zealand
New Zealand's mountains are comparable in size, it is claimed, with Europe’s Alps. Leaving aside the so-called "club-fields", most skiers and boarders head for South Island (in the Southern Alps) and the ski areas near Queenstown in the south or Christchurch on the east coast.
Queenstown is a bustling but attractive town on the shores of Lake Wakatipu, close to Coronet Peak and The Remarkables. By contrast, Lake Wanaka, some 44 miles from Queenstown on the scenic high route (73 miles by the conventional route), is – at least relatively speaking - an oasis of calm, with Cardrona and Treble Cone ski resorts not far away, plus some excellent helicopter skiing in the Harris Mountains. Treble Cone is, by consensus, South Island’s best commercial ski area whereas Cardrona offers mainly beginner-intermediate slopes with some contrastingly wild, serious experts-only all-mountain terrain thrown in.
Christchurch offers Mount Hutt and a cluster of smaller resorts and club fields. Apart from these principle centres of the New Zealand skiing world, South Island has a scattering of smaller ski areas, like Porter Heights, Mount Lyford and Rainbow, which started out as “club fields” – an intriguing New Zealand concept which precipitated up to a score of small, fairly basic ski areas with little or no grooming and primitive lifts.
North Island, without a major alpine range of its own, has a couple of small mountain chains and two big and important commercial ski areas (Whakapapa and Turoa) on either side of a huge, sprawling and active volcano – Mount Ruapehu. Publicly owned Whakapapa ski area purchased its neighbour Turoa at the turn of the century, and in an ideal world could have linked the two ski areas to form a superlative ski area which would have dwarfed every other New Zealand ski area. But although it is possible to ski off-piste from Whakapapa to Turoa, linking them by lift is, unfortunately, impractical.
With the exception of Cardrona, New Zealand’s ski areas do not have on-mountain accommodation, which means that each day you must negotiate quite long dirt roads with hair-pin bends and - more often than not - little in the way of crash barriers to protect you from big drops. Fatalities are rare but not unknown. The road up to Mount Hutt from Methven is probably the scariest, with the risk of high winds - as you meander towards the slopes - an additional hazard. The second half of the bleak 25km journey from Methven to Mount Hutt , with steep, exposed sections and unsettling drops, remains one of the more nerve-racking drives in the country.And the last section of the 12 mile drive from Wanaka to Treble Cone, from Glendhu Bay, can also be a little hair-raising: building the road to the resort in 1976 was considered quite a feat. A gondola is being considered to make things a little easier. But in general, visitors should not expect massive European-style lift systems: a handful of strategically placed lifts usually provides plenty of variety.
When you descend to base after skiing - be it to Methven, Queenstown, Wanaka or Ohakune (Mount Ruapehu) - you will have escaped from the snow environment: even during harsh winters, it rarely snows in town. The valleys remain green, and the lakes blue and sparkling. Unlike the European Alps, there is no need to live in the snow in order to ski.
Skiing New Zealand's Club Fields
There are a dozen or so club fields, almost entirely in South Island, and they represent the history of New Zealand’s skiing industry: most of the country’s commercial ski areas, including Mount Hutt started life as club fields. Those areas which chose to retain their non-commercial status remain in that category.Club fields are almost invariably served by "nutcracker" lifts, as often as not powered by car or tractor engines, which are difficult to master, but the mainstay of early New Zealand skiing. Skiers wear a belt with a large, metal nutcracker-shaped device attached to it, and have to grab the rope with one hand, well-protected by a special heavy-duty glove (to prevent burning into soft gloves or even softer hands). They then try to flip the nutcracker over the rope, squeezing it with a vice-like rip. Once accomplished, you must then let your belt take your weight, or your arms will be exhausted and almost pulled out of their sockets before you get to the top. Meanwhile you attempt to keep your hands away from the numerous pulleys the rope passes through, hoping you will not lose a thumb on the way up. (It never happens – just feels as though it might!)
For the uninitiated, getting up the mountain is as fraught and tiring as getting down again on un-groomed trails. Unlike almost all New Zealand’s commercial areas, almost all club fields have lodging – some a little ramshackle – and club members also share in their upkeep. They pay cheap rates for the limited lifts and subsidise the clubs by sharing daily duties such as cooking, washing up, cleaning, and keeping the heating systems going.
