I should tell you about Brett.
Brett describes himself as an intermediate skier. He is not. He is an advanced envelope-pusher who has taken to parabolic skis. He had a fearlessness that troubled me. One evening he pointed at his mate Phil and said, “”Phil’s skiing’s improved since we’ve been in New Zealand. He was skiing like a Young Liberal when we arrived. Now. It’s straight down the fall line.”
I met Brett on a Black Diamond Safari in New Zealand at Mount Cheesman one of the smaller club fields and we later skied out of Queenstown at Coronet Peak and its twin resort the Remarkables. His fearlessness was invaluable.
Without fearlessness, the skis will not work, especially the new carve skis.
You cannot go straight down a hill. You will go too fast. You have to turn and snake down the hill to slow down and stay in control. The trouble is that as you turn, centrifugal force and gravity tend to throw you out and down the hill. So it is perfectly natural to lean back and into the hill to counteract these forces. Disaster. Control with carve ski comes from the ski on the downhill side, so you have to put your weight over it. And you have to put your weight over its length evenly. This means two things. You must lean forward down the slope and when you turn you must lean over your outside ski. It defies every instinct of self-preservation. But it works.
It works better if you are fearless and can lean out and down. If you are not fearless, it helps to have someone like Brett leading to prove that fearlessness pays off.
The other part of fearlessness is going straight down the fall-line, and not criss-crossing with hairpin bends.
Then there is powder snow. If the snow is packed down the skis will turn and move left to right more easily. In powder, there is greater resistance to movement. That has two awkward consequences. First, it is more difficult to get the skis to go in the direction you want and secondly, once they are going the wrong way it is more difficult to correct them.
But if you get it right, which unfortunately was not too often in my case, the difference is like that between cask and Grange — it is a fluffy bounce more a feeling of side-to-side than down a hill.
In my case, I has to unlearn a lot of old habits like unweighting with the upper body.
Heather Dent from Black Diamond described the way to ski powder with carve skis best. She said, “”Picture yourself driving a bus with a big flat steering wheel. Neither arm can go behind you without you letting go the steering wheel. So don’t let go the steering wheel. And guts in when you turn. It holds up the upper body.”
And with a leap of faith, fearlessness and following the instructions you float down the hill. So I owe Brett. Without him I would never have gone down those steep ungroomed slopes. You float — until you get a crisis in confidence and know you are going too fast. Fear takes over, you lean backwards and in and, inevitably, fall over. At least the snow is soft and deep. But beware, I lost a ski in powder. It took an age to find.
I hate to say this, but I think it would be easier on a snowboard. At least you have only one thing to go wrong. With skis you have double the chance of error.
On the days I was at Coronet Peak and the Remarkables it usually did not get above freezing and on a couple of days there had been a dump the night before of light powder which had not been packed down by grooming. We don’t often get it in Australia, so we are unpractised.
The two resorts were celebrating their Mid-Winter Wonder.
To me the wonder was the snow condition — quality and quantity. But no. Someone thought we ought to have Christmas carols belted out over the snow in August. If we are to hanker after European tradition in the Antipodes must we do it with 3000 watt Japanese speakers and amplifiers. It is August. Surely only shopping malls believe in Christmas in August.
It is to be an annual event. If so they should celebrate New Zealand things, like heliskiing in the Southern Alps wilderness.
Anyway Coronet Peak and the Remarkables are above the tree-line and had great cover. From a Canberra perspective it is worth doing your weekends at Thredbo and Perisher Blue and doing the week’s ski in New Zealand. The upside is that it doesn’t cost much more to go to NZ and the snow is more reliable. The downside is that you cannot stay on the mountain and ski out from the lodge anywhere in NZ.
Also in NZ, they close the mountain more often that in Australian resorts. This is because they rely on chairlifts which cannot run in high wind and because the roads up the mountain become unsafe in poor conditions. Though it is unlikely both resorts are closed or that you cannot drive two hours to Treble Cone or Cardrona.
The falling of snow, and therefore occasional hellish weather, is a necessary concomitant of skiing.
However, when the mountain is closed Queenstown has a lot else to offer, aside from the mad bungy jumping and jet-boating.
I came across an extraordinary motor museum, quite by accident. I didn’t see an advertisement for it anywhere.
It had a 1959 pink Cadillac. It was enormous with chrome and jagged wings front and back. The duco was smooth to touch, unlike any other car. Despite its monstrous size it had no back doors. It had three Jaguars: a 1965 red E type (of my childhood dreams), a 1956 Mark I and a 1952 first sports series. It had cars from the early 20th century, a 1902 shaft driven bicycle and a 1948 Bristol the first car to travel 100 miles in an hour (that is, it motored the full distance in under 60 minutes). There was a Maigret Citroen. I was the only visitor. What was this extraordinary museum of the industrial age doing in this remote southern tip of the world. Then I recalled that not so long ago the whole of New Zealand was a one large motor museum, when import duties were so stiff that New Zealanders repaired 1948 Morris Oxfords with fencing wire and used them as everyday transport.
The only relevance this has in a skiing column is to provide a contrast with the usual apres ski fare: fine dining in prohibitively priced restaurants.
Crispin Hull was a guest of Coronet Peak and Remarkables resorts, but paid his own way to NZ (and the $5 entry fee to the motor museum.)
Blocklines:
1. Skiers at the top of Coronet Peak (1649m, vertical drop 420m, skiable area 280ha). Queenstown and Lake Wakatipu are down the hill 14kms by road or 1340m in vertical drop. At the top left is the Remarkables skifields (1935m vertical drop 357 Skiable area 220ha).
2. Skiers at the top of the chairlift at Coronet Peak (1649m, vertical drop 420m, skiable area 280ha). Queenstown and Lake Wakatipu are down the hill 14kms by road or 1340m in vertical drop.