Mt. Hutt: Skiing in New Zealand

For the very small percentage of our readers who don't know me very well: skiing is just about my favorite thing in the world. So when our holiday swing through Australia and New Zealand coincided with the start of the Southern Hemisphere ski season, I couldn't resist the temptation to slap on some skis and hit the slopes in July.

Incontrovertible video evidence:

Now, to a certain extent, skiing is skiing, wherever you do it. The same fundamental set of variables apply: snow conditions, run length, vertical drop, lift speed. Two mountains of a similar size and shape aren't made all that different if you drop one in Korea and the other in Vermont.

With that said: Mt. Hutt is crazy.

First, it's one of the largest ski areas in New Zealand, but in terms of sheer size it's not actually all that big. Sure, it's almost 700 m (2250 feet) from top to bottom, but there's really only one basin with one lodge and a grand total of three chairlifts. It was this more than anything else that drove home just how few New Zealanders there are: at about 4.5 million, the population of New Zealand is a bit less than the population of Fukuoka Prefecture, or roughly two Pittsburgh metro areas.

And that population supports 25 ski areas. No wonder even the biggest of them feels a bit small!

Nevertheless, despite the small size (and the vagaries of the weather), Mt. Hutt is still a really good place to ski. Like pretty much all of New Zealand's ski fields, it's entirely above the country's very low tree line, meaning that you get a lot of skiable terrain in a relatively small area. In addition, Mt. Hutt packs a surprising amount of beginner and intermediate terrain into a fairly steep and narrow basin. But mostly importantly, the top of the hill has some blisteringly fast, wide-open steeps - with views stretching out over the whole Canterbury Plain, when weather permits.

The gate to the back country.

You can see here why they built the place so high up: in New Zealand, the low areas stay pretty mild throughout the year.

But by far the craziest thing about Mt. Hutt is the ascent. The "base" lodge is actually about two-thirds of the way up the peak, roughly in the middle of the ski area. If Hutt were in Europe, where it would have a bigger client base, they would have solved this problem with a cable car or alpine railway.

Here, the solution is an unpaved access road that climbs almost 5000 ft (1500 m) in the space of 8 miles (13 km). Basically, you turn off a road in the middle of nowhere on the flat-as-a-pancake Canterbury Plain, then go straight up an even smaller road even deeper into the middle of nowhere.

See if you can spot the road snaking around in the distance!

PS: We're on a bus for this one. Not a road I thought either of us should have to drive!

Yeah, of the side of the road, that's darn near a sheer drop for a good thousand feet. Kiwis are a different breed . . .