Powder days at Broken River

All last week a storm was brewing on the MetVUW website with forecasts for decent snowfalls early this week. Despite the usual overenthusiasm of that forecast, we did in fact get a few centimetres of snow on Monday afternoon and evening, and another top up on Tuesday night. These two snowfalls provided a 10-15cm layer of fresh snow and with the help of some wind some of the gullies loaded up a bit more. By the time Wednesday rolled around, there were fresh turns to be had all over the mountain and beautiful clear sunny skies. In short, it was a bluebird mini powder day.

So, how many people do you think jumped in their cars and drove up from Christchurch? How long do you think the phones ran hot as people tried to book accommodation? How long were the queues at the rope tows? The answers are: Roughly 5, the phones didn’t ring, I didn’t have to wait for a tow at any time during the day.

At one stage, Doug the mountain manager here mentioned that there were about eleven people skiing at the field. Eleven. On a powder day. In a normal world there would be fierce competition for fresh tracks, people would be rushing to get up the tows and onto the main field. But this is not a normal world, this is Broken River in September. Today there was so much snow to go around that people weren’t even competing for fresh tracks, they were competing for unskied lines. If someone had skied down a gully, the best option was to head to the next gully along, which was likely to be untouched. At one stage I ducked into the day lodge to get a drink and there was no one skiing in the main basin.

It must have been an awesome day for the guys who drove up for the day. All the regulars headed off the main field to ski in the basins to either side. I literally did not do a run on the main field during the whole day. Since the other four regulars and the staff were skiing similar areas, it gave the other seven-odd day-trippers the entire main field to track out all day. Ri Dick U Lous

You’d think people would be rushing through lunch to get back out on the hill, but not here. Everyone fires up the barbeque and cooks the various meat products they’ve inevitably brought up. Someone had some chopped up spuds to go into the deep fryer, beers are pulled from the snow and drunk. Life is good.

And after lunch, a few of us headed into one of the runs just outside the patrolled boundary and skied hundreds of metres of untouched snow. Sure, I admit that the powder wasn’t bottomless, and that you hit the crust underneath every now and then, but one of the guys here got out of bed at midday, rolled up the slopes at two and still got fresh turns. When you can do that at your commercial field you can write me a letter all about it.

So if you’re wondering whether you should ski at the club fields (with their nasty access roads and despicable rope tows) or one of the commercial fields I can assure you that you’ll have a much better time if you ski at the commercial fields. After all, you probably hate skiing fresh powder and lounging on a sun deck.