Today when listening to the live from the mountain snow report, we were told to “come on up it’s a beautiful day, all the lifts are open and its going to be a cracker”. With all the Australians at present in New Zealand skiing, the choice of the word ‘cracker’ was practically poignant
Driving up to the ski field during the morning rush was the usual signs of cars, buses and vans snaking up the mountain. However today there was an equal amount of cars returning down the mountain. A continue stream of cars leaving the mountain at 9.45am raised my suspicions.
The lower mountain was clear and calm with a little light patchy cloud lingering. As we progressed further the cloud got thicker to a point that visibility was a total white out. When we finally arrived at the ski field car park the maximum visibility was about fifteen metres at best. Definitely not a cracker of a day.
All the major New Zealand ski fields issue an early morning snow report. This is usually faxed or emailed to all the major hotels, local cafes and even the petrol stations receive and post in their widows the current and predicted mountain conditions.
To be fair these reports are done very early in the morning and like a weather forecast, they are to some degree a prediction. However when I compared the government mountain forecast with that of the ski field the two beared little resemblance. The ski reports are nothing more than advertising brochures for the ski fields. They put a positive spin on even the worst of weather days. But there’s more, the telephone radio reports are even more farcical and can not be relied on.
The best tip to getting a real idea as to the conditions is to go to the web cam page of the ski field and see for yourself. The only problem is if you want an early start, the web cams on most fields only start to update from 9 or 9.30 am.