How was your winter? The chances are that if you went to the Alps in the early part of the season and it was your only ski holiday of the year, you might well have not had the happiest experience - at least with the elements, even if the apres-ski helped make up of it.
Those who visited European resorts in late February or early spring, however - perhaps giving a skiing holiday a second shot after a dismal time in December or January - will have fared better. True to its best-known aphorism (not 'beware the ides of March', but 'March comes in like a lamb and goes out like a lion') the snow arrived with a vengeance. However, if you only went early, just the once, and it was grimly snowless, it's not too late to try to put things right in the coming months. But you'll have to earn your turns with an epic journey by air.
There is only one place in the world where you can ski in dozens of English speaking resorts during the British summer, and that's New Zealand's Ka Tiritiri o te Moana (Southern Alps). It is, unfortunately - or perhaps fortunately for New Zealanders - an awful long way to travel for a skiing holiday in resorts which are typically much smaller than Europe's big guns. So to sugar the seriously long-haul pill, those prepared to give New Zealand a go could build in some other exotic attractions to ensure that it's not just the skiing they are pinning their hopes on.
On some flights, Air New Zealand routinely stops off in the South Seas with flights from London to Auckland via Los Angeles, so you could easily build in a few days in Tahiti, Fiji, the Cook Islands, Samoa or Tonga. The airline also has a new route from London to New Zealand via Hong Kong. In addition, you could always build in a side trip to Australia - to visit any number of locations that won't take you too far from Sydney. You could even try the slopes in New South Wales or Victoria (like those at Thredbo, Perisher Blue or Mount Hotham), which aren't at all bad in a decent winter.
The skiing in New Zealand is great fun if not epic. Apart from some exciting terrain on Mount Ruapehu - a far-from-extinct volcano on North Island with the biggest vertical drop in Australasia - most of the country's skiing is on South Island, where it is claimed there are more mountains than in the European Alps (impressive, even if only half true). There are three main skiing gateways: the busy lakeside resort town of Queenstown is close to two of New Zealand's most popular resorts - The Remarkables and Coronet Peak. The much more tranquil backwater of Wanaka, a 75-mile journey from Queenstown, provides access to Treble Cone, which by general consensus has South Island's most challenging terrain, and Cardrona, with easier skiing but not without some extreme slopes too.
Christchurch, for all the world like some old English market town on the Canterbury Plains, is the gateway to Methven, a charming little town which provides the base for skiing at Mount Hutt, where the tantalisingly unpredictable weather has helped give one of the country's best known resorts its rather unfair sobriquet of 'Mount Shut'.
Although there are no lifts on New Zealand's highest and most spectacular peak, Mount Cook (3744m) - nowadays rejoicing in the more politically correct name of Aoraki (Maori for 'Cloud Piercer') - you can heliski there, and skiers with a guide can be dropped off by light aircraft too.
But New Zealand's main centres for heliskiing are in the Harris Mountains and the Arrowsmith range near Methven. There is more in the Thomson, Hector and Richardson ranges in the Southern Lakes region. You can also heliski at Mount Hutt and on the Fox Glacier.
At the other end of the scale are New Zealand's celebrated 'club fields' - a concept and style of skiing that has pretty much vanished from the rest of the planet. These small and usually primitive ski fields - left over from the industry's pioneer days - are huge fun, and very cheap. With the possible exception of Central Canterbury's Craigieburn Valley, which has some of the best skiing in the country, the names of these intriguing but essentially anachronistic little areas are scarcely known in New Zealand, let alone on the other side of the world in Europe. There are a dozen or so of them, and they resemble living museums of New Zealand's skiing history. And in the extremely unlikely event of anyone travelling all the way to New Zealand from Europe with the idea of spending an entire holiday skiing a club field, it would almost certainly be a disappointment. But as an add-on - a cheap but richly rewarding experience.
What they do have - virtually unknown in the country's 'full-fledged' commercial ski fields, but essential in Europe's Alps - is on-mountain accommodation, albeit more youth hostel than hotel. By contrast, to get to the country's commercial fields, you simply drive to the slopes and drive back down again after the lifts have shut.
Yet some of the country's leading commercial ski areas, including Mount Hutt, started out as club fields. The roads to reach them are often as basic as the club fields' infrastructure, and the second half of the bleak 25-km journey from Methven to Mount Hutt, with steep, exposed sections and un-nerving drops, remains one of the more nerve-racking drives in the country.
Often the skiing in club fields is excellent, but typically there is little or no grooming and primitive 'nutcracker' lifts - usually powered by car or tractor engines. The lifts are hard to master. When the uninitiated grapple with the ropeway and the metal device or 'nutcracker' which is supposed to transfer the strain of pulling you up the mountain from the desperate grip of your hands hands to a belt round your waist, they are liable to burn a hole in at least one ski glove - and cause users to be fearful that a thumb might be chopped off by one of the many small pulley-wheels. (In my experience this never happens - it just feels as thought it might.)
Because club fields are run on such basic technology, members pay cheap rates to ski there. They also subsidise the clubs by sharing daily duties such as cooking, washing up, cleaning, and keeping the heating systems going.
While Club Fields cannot really be worth travelling 12,500 miles for, New Zealand skiing in general may just be. Especially if you have had a miserable time in our own Alps. And even more especially if you can bask on a South Seas beach for a few days en route.
By Arnie Wilson
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