1998_07_july_snow falls creek

Athin orange line appears on the eastern horizon. In a short time the ghosts of the mountain can go to bed.

The temperature is minus I don’t know what. My right hand is freezing because I have taken the glove off to take photographs. To my right an enormous roar is generated by a large machine. It is putting an addictive white powder on to the ground. This is designer stuff, not the natural material. It will make a lot of money for the people in the trade.

But though addictive, this is a healthy trade. It is sport and fun. It is skiing.

In the past five years the sport and industry have been transformed by a combination of half a dozen factors not forseen in the late 1980s.

Indeed, then I thought skiing in Australia was doomed. The snow areas was limited. The greenhouse effect was predicted to shorten the season or even make Australia snow free. And lift queues seemed impossibly long with no relief in sight. Weekend skiing was becoming like a British Post Office.

Now there are optimists all over the Australian mountains, particularly in Victoria.

What has made the change?

Snow-making is the most important. Before it, a bad season could result in very poor returns and therefore a reluctance to invest in other skiing facilities. In Australia, nights when it is cold enough for snow are so often clear and dry and when moisture-laden weather comes it is often with warmer air that means rain rather than snow. Now machinery can make use of the cold clear nights.

The other factors are:

Better ski-lifts

Better grooming

Snow-boarding to keep young people in, which has been a big problem for some industries, even newspapers

New-design parabolic skis first introduced in 1995 but now set to reinvigorate skiing among baby boomers because parabolics make skiing easier for less agile legs

Better off-snow facilities, especially fine dining

And lastly real estate.

But let’s return to the ghosts. One of the ghosts is adjusting the snow-making machine on the top of Panorama run at Falls Creeks.

It’s Mike Parker. Jacket covered in snow. He and his colleagues work all night looking after snow-making machines connected to 19 kilometres of underground pipeline that pump water from Rocky Valley dam, a virtually limitless source of water which doubles as a rowing-training course in summer. Six computer-linked weather stations tell team of changes to wind speed and direction, temperature and humidity so they can adjust the machines to make the right sort of snow.

Now dawn has arrived and it is time to turn the machines off. In a few hours the grey, silent slopes will be dotted with bright-coloured skiers in the sun.

Snow-making technology has improved over the past five years. You can do it at higher temperatures and you can control the type of snow. Early in the season while getting the base can control flake to be hard. Later when topping up, the flake can be made fluffy.

Artificial snow has benefits because the flake are an identical size so they lock together better to form a stronger base. Also the identically sized flakes make it a more predictable surface for skiers. Natural snow is all different.

Energy costs are now two-thirds of what they were five seasons ago because of smarter nozzle.

Falls Creek had a good cover over about half the runs last weekend. Without snow-making the resort would not yet be open. It has added more certainty for July skiers. In some American resorts they can open without any natural snow.

Non-skiers have a resentful or dismissive attitude to these high-tech, high-cost elements of skiing. Downhill skiing is seen, on one hand, as an expensive, elitist sport for yuppies and a waste of money. Others see it as an affront to nature. Yet sports with equally huge amounts of money spent on them, much of it public money, don’t get that reaction. I think it is because sports like golf, football, motor racing, swimming and tennis are very visible. No one questions the amount of land or expensive equipment that go in to them. But skiing is remote.

Also, there are lots of horror stories of first and last trips to the snow. Miserable weather, failure to get anywhere on Day 1, being wet and cold and so on.

The weather can’t be altered, but much is being done in resorts to make skiing more fun from Day 1.

The big push has been to reduce queues.

There is time in the queue; time on the lift; and time skiing down the mountain. Skiing is perhaps the only industry which seeks to increase down time.

Old between-the-legs Pomas, t-bars and slow chairs are being replaced with higher capacity chairlifts.

An old fixed grip chair lift would run at about 2.5 metres a second. At that speed it is hard to get on. The newer lifts detach each chair at the top and bottom and put them on to a 1.5 metre a second cable so it is easy to get on and off. They then are reconnected to the high speed cable that goes at five metres a second for the trip up the mountain. The newer chairs carry four people in each chair. So carrying capacity is more than doubled.

Falls Creek has 20 lifts over 450 hectares. This is smaller than Thredbo or Perisher Blue in NSW, but the Victorians are making a big push for NSW skiers.

A 1996 survey showed that only 7 per cent of Victoria’s 660,000 skier days comprised people from NSW or the ACT.

The trouble for NSW is that the resorts have nowhere to go. They are already within national park boundaries and are as close as they can reasonably go to the environmentally sensitive Main Range.

Falls Creek is only skiing on 25 per cent of its lease. It hopes to add a $35 million development on Mount McKay within its lease by next season if all planning, environmental, and Aboriginal heritage requirements are met. This year it combined with Mount Hotham and added a six-minute helicopter link which runs several times a day. The road trip around takes several hours.

An airport is planned at Dinner Plain, just 11kms from Mount Hotham which will take 35-seaters.

So next year a skier could leave Sydney Airport and be on the snow in Victoria in a resort with as many lifts and as much snow area as going to any resort in NSW because in NSW the air trip ends in Cooma, still a couple of hours from the resorts. And Thredbo has to add the hang-up from last year’s lodge tragedy to the equation.

The Mount McKay development has met its share of controversy. The National Parks Association opposes it. Ian Grant, managing director of Falls Creeks Ski Lifts Pty Ltd, says the resort has been working on it for two years to meet environmental and Aboriginal concerns and to ensure visual impact is minimised.

Grant says he has had no free kicks from the Kennett Government.

“”You have to do it properly,” he says.

Falls Creek also has the advantage of ski in, ski out. The lodges are right in the snow. You can ski to the door and in the morning ski from the door to the lift. Very few lodges in NSW are like this; nearly all require a hike. Also, for day-trippers the lift base at Falls Creek is at the carpark. Incidentally, in New Zealand all lodges are off the mountain.

On the other hand, Perisher Blue in NSW boasts the ski-tube, where you park down the mountain and catch the train up, so you never have to carry or fit chains.

Against that, Falls Creek offers something that NSW resorts (being in the national park) cannot offer: snowmobile trips.

Former world championship skier Steve Lee runs one-hour guided drive-yourself trips. The trip goes along snow-covered forest roads and then out to the high plains. Unlike the ghastly trail-bike, snowmobiles only travel over snow so don’t affect vegetation.

Grant says that skiers used to be loyal to one resort, but that is changing. The market share is there to be caught. The skiing demographic is broadening.

Young people have been caught by the snow-boarding fad. It is a spin off from surfing and skate-boarding. It has kept young people in the snow.

A spin off from snow-boarding has been parabolic skis. For a start the ski industry was losing market share to the boarders who now take 30 per cent of the market. One of the reasons is that boarding is easier, at least at first.

The boards also showed a better way of making things for humans to go down snow-covered mountains.

Boarders found that the greater the waist-cut, the better the turning ability. So board became more hour-glass shaped. Because boards were wide, it was easy to do. But in the past few years, carbon-fibre and other materials technology has enabled skis to go the same way.

Parabolic skis have a narrow waist, where the boot is, and wider tips and tails.

So when the ski is tipped on its edge and bent with the force of the boot, the edge on the snow carves a tighter turn than an ordinary ski. See diagram.

These skis could only be mass-produced very recently when hi-tech carbon-fibre materials became cheaper. Earlier materials were not strong enough and the ski would have bowed so a cross-section would have looked like a banana.

The parabolics turn tighter with the same amount of force, so they are easier to turn. You get a greater control when learning. You don’t slide out as much so medium and advanced skiers feel they can ski more aggressively and faster without killing themselves if they hit a patch of ice.

Soon they will be the only sort of ski.

Purists, of course, argue that it is cheating. But those purists no longer use wooden skis. The parabolics are a bit like large-head tennis and squash rackets; you rarely see the old ones now.

These ageing baby-boomers are also being greeted with other changes directed to keep them skiing.

Many lodges have abandoned the old bring-and-cook-yourself routine. Rather they go in for fine dining, as transport improves delivery of fresh food. Some give their restaurants different names to the lodge. Attunga, where I stayed, has the Windows on the Alps Restaurant, with a beautiful view to Mount Bogong.

You could do a fine food and wine tour around Falls Creek and treat the skiing as secondary.

But the big money spin off has been real estate. That is a lesson from the US. Ski resorts make money as much from real-estate as from skiing.

Thredbo, with 4810 beds, is under constraints following the lodge collapse. Perisher Blue, with 4643, has run into problems with its plan to build more beds in the park. Falls-Hotham is planning about $200 million in real-estate development that will take the bed numbers at Falls to 7500 and Hotham to 8500.

Ian Grant says he will build the units and sell them. The we set up a reservation company to market and handle the individually owned self-contained apartments. Individuals also help market their own units among their friends. And these people will through word of mouth market skiing.

And what about the greenhouse effect?

On some models of global warming, the whole of the mountains will be under the winter snowline. It will wipe out the whole of the mountain ecology. Grant is more optimistic. (He’d need to be with that sort of investment at stake.) He says Falls Creek has records going back 90 years and the temperature now is half a degree down on average compared to then.

Those with a healthy addiction to the little white powder hope he is right.

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