Broken River is halfway along highway 73, which links Christchurch and the east coast to Greymouth and the west coast. It’s also what’s called a club field, a small ski area that is owned and run by a ski club rather than as a commercial venture. There are heaps of club fields scattered across NZ. Highway 73 has four (that I know of) on its own. They tend to have pretty simple facilities and cover fairly small areas but they have a friendly vibe, no crowds and are supposed to be good access points for lots of backcountry skiing. I went to Broken River because before I left I had two recommendations for skis areas and the other one (Mt Olympus) is complicated to get to. I’ve also been warned that Mt Olympus has a raging party scene. Those that know me will realise that this is a prospect that thrills me to the very core of my being.
Each club field has its own weird idiosyncrasy that its members can refer to when explaining why their club is better than everyone else’s. For Mt Olympus, it’s that it has a hot tub (and an air of mystery because very few people have ever actually found the place). For Cragieburn it’s that it’s full of really hard skiing and that they ritualistically haze any beginners who accidentally make it up the access road. For Mount Cheeseman it’s that nobody goes there (although rumour has it that Salman Rushdie used to ski there during his fatwah phase). For Broken River it’s a funicular tramway. Yes people, it’s so good it has fun in its name. This allows visitors to bypass the traditional hike from the car-park to the ski field and accommodation, which is conveniently located nowhere near the car-park. (Locating one’s carpark at some distance from one’s ski field and filling that distance with obstacles is something of an institution at club fields. I hope to return to this matter in more detail at a later date). The problem with the funicular tramway is that it isn’t something you can really build your skip trip around. For example, you can spend your whole trip at Cragieburn skiing really hard terrain (or being hazed), or laze for hours in the Mt Olympus hot tub, or spend years of your life not at Mt Cheeseman. However, although it’s not explicitly stated, one gets the feeling at Broken River that riding up and down the funicular tramway more than a couple of times each day would be frowned upon.
Anyway, four days of skiing so far... The good news about skiing is that I’ve done it. The bad news is that I’m terrible at it. This was to be expected. I was never that good to start with and it’s been a long time since my last serious bout of skiing at the start of 2009. I’ve also just finished my rehab for my last knee reconstruction, so I’m unfit and made mostly out of pudding. However, I had one great day before I left Australia that might have boosted my confidence a bit further than it should have. It will be a while before I’m competent enough to ski anything too serious or committing. That’s OK though, the whole point of being here is to make that time available.
I skied for three days before a combination of bad weather, tired legs and erring on the side of knee-related caution convinced me to wait out the latest round of storms. I returned to Porters (a small commercial resort that earns the scorn of the Broken River club members for its T-bars) today but the snow had suffered from the recent winds and they started closing lifts early as more bad weather closed in during the afternoon. In Australia, when it’s windy, the snow on the ridgelines consolidates into bulletproof ice. In New Zealand, when it’s windy, the snow on the ridgelines disappears, and the remaining rock and scree is gradually blown across whatever snow remains in any sheltered gullies or faces. In both cases, it’s nasty and best not to get involved.
Tomorrow I’ll return to Broken River and try to meet up with my brother. He’s a regular at the field and I’m hoping he’ll be able to show me around some of the more interesting terrain. Whether or not I can ski any of the interesting terrain remains to be seen.
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