Last week I took a chance and decided to head to Christchurch to restock the pantry before (rather than during or after) a series of forecast storms rolled in. This turned out to be a good idea, because as I drove into town and ran my errands the weather report steadily changed from “a bunch of storms early in the week” to “snow, everywhere, in epic quantities”. Indeed, it seemed that a once in a decade snowstorm was about to hit the whole of New Zealand (the news said they last had snow in some part of Auckland in 1932). The people of Christchurch certainly paid attention – I went to four different large supermarkets and none of them had any bread. All that was left was crumpets, bagels and gluten free bread. This shows two things. 1) After a pretty exhausting series of natural disasters, when it comes to dire forecasts the people of Christchurch don’t mess around. 2) No matter how desperate humanity becomes people still can’t take gluten free bread seriously.
I drove in as the storm started and managed to crawl up the access road through the first of the fresh snowfalls. It turned out my timing was pretty good, because from that moment until roughly this morning (Thursday) the storm has been in full voice. We’ve had 85cm of fresh snow, but most if not all of the ski field has been closed during that time due to a mix of high winds, low visibility and avalanche control work. The wind has also been blowing up the valley, which has been piling snow up down low but blowing it away up high. In all it’s made for some variable, and at times awesome, skiing. Most of the skiing has been done at night under floodlights – the floodlights provide a bit more perspective and can actually make for better visibility than during the day.
To complicate matters, the highway between BR and anywhere has been closed since Sunday. This has kept a bunch of the same people at the field. The volunteer patrollers who come up on the weekends have only just been able to return to town (and their jobs/families/pets) today. As things open up there’s likely to be a flood of people rushing up to get in on the fresh snow. The fields on the range are only now managing to finish digging out their tow lines, bombing their avalanche start zones and opening their terrain so there’s likely to be a bunch of fresh tracks up for grabs.
The road closures and rough weather have been tough on some of the other guests here. It is, in fact, Scone Grabbers’ Week. In what can only been a sign that the supreme being agrees with me that “Scone Grabbers” is an unsuitable name for anything involving small children, the young families up here have been plagued with gale force winds, freezing temperatures, a closed ski field and (the icing on the cake of suffering) a few rounds of gastro. They parents have bravely made the best of the breaks in the weather, and apparently the kids have had fun, but I hope everyone has a good long think about what they’re going to call their ski week next year.
It looks like the road is either open now or will be really soon, so I’ll hang out up here for a few days to see what the storm has left us, then I’m thinking about heading to some of the other fields that apparently got dumped on during the week.
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