Snowlines: Ski man dreams of super resort

By COLIN MOORE

Dave Mazey has an expansive, and expensive, dream. The 48-year-old general manager of Ruapehu Alpine Lifts has a vision of a tourist region centred on the mountains of the Tongariro National Park that will compete internationally with Queenstown and Wanaka.

It has been a sad end to the century for the ski resorts of Mt Ruapehu, bedevilled by volcanic eruption and a succession of lean snow years that forced the Turoa resort into receivership.

But Mazey, who joined RAL in 1986 after 10 years with the Department of Conservation, remains optimistic for the tourist future of the mountain and the region. And he describes that future with a quiet determination that leaves you in no doubt that it will one day come to fruition.

The Commerce Commission willing, the Whakapapa and Turoa resorts will have merged before the start of the next season.

It is a merger that makes sense to almost everyone except those who compiled the commission's preliminary assessment. Should its final view heed the consumers' wishes, it will mean a busy summer for Mazey and RAL.

"There are advantages in a merger in general management, finance and marketing," says Mazey. "Those are a given.

"If the merger goes ahead we will need to rebrand the resorts as a single entity but operationally Whakapapa and Turoa would stay as two fields, or at least a mixture.

"Our first task would be to sit down with the senior management at Turoa and discuss that. But from a consumer's point of view, there would be one phone call, one brand, one website.

"We want people to spend 10 days on the North Island skifields rather than eight."

Mazey gives an example of how the complementary weather and terrain between Turoa and Whakapapa could work to the consumers' advantage if the fields were merged.

"We see a lot of school groups here but at present they have to make a lot of decisions in advance," he says.

"If the fields were merged the decisions on where to stay and what to do would be much easier.

"On days when the weather was bad on one side and not the other, there would be no disadvantage to the school group. We would just shift the rental gear and the instructors to suit them."

Mazey says that in the first year of a merger shuttle buses would be run on the hour every hour between the Whakapapa and Turoa fields, and an application would be made to DoC to cut a high-level cat track in the snow between the two ski areas.

The track would allow skiers and snowboarders to make a 30-to-35-minute traverse from the top of the Far West T-bar at Whakapapa to the top of the Moro T-bar at Turoa.

"Maintaining and patrolling a groomed trail between the fields would be easy," says Mazey. "We have done that this year at Whakapapa on the old 'traverse of fear.'

"Once you have a link between Whakapapa and Turoa, that's a serious resort. That puts it into the reasonably large category by any international standards."

If RAL had enjoyed a similar level of income in the second half of the 90s as it did in the first half of the decade, some $6.5 million to $7 million would have been spent on developments at Whakapapa.

The plans included an express chairlift in Te Heu Heu Valley and a major snowmaking system in the Rockgarden.

"They are still our priority," says Mazey.

The valley chair would be a detachable, six-person chair which would be heavier and less susceptible to crosswinds. It would begin slightly lower than the existing Valley T-bar, take a line more to the right and run considerably higher.

The chair would be quite a bit longer than the Waterfall Express chair and open up about 40 per cent more terrain. From the top of the lifts skiers could access The Gut.

Mazey says that the various trails available in Te Heu Heu Valley could handle up to 3000 skiers and boarders an hour. A six-person express lift would carry that many.

Changes in lift technology made a single high-capacity, high-speed lift a better option than a series of lifts to carry the same number of people. A single lift required less maintenance on loading and unloading areas.

Out west, the long-term plans are for a similar high-capacity lift to start from below the present quad and rise to 2300m on Restful Ridge, which is as high as the park management plan allows.

In the Happy Valley beginners area rope tows could be replaced with moving carpets.

Mazey says the Top of the Bruce base area was developed when four different concessionaires ran the field. It needs to be redeveloped so it's like a modern airport, he says. Leave your car, go through ticketing and check-in, then board your chairlift - passing as many retail and food opportunities as possible.

He envisages a three-storey building that would serve two high-capacity access lifts. The first, replacing the two existing doubles, would run from the present creche to Hut Flat. The second, which would replace the National Downhill chair, would run from near Iwikau Shelter to above Delta Corner.

In Mazey's dream the Delta Corner chair would be a gondola because it would be the lift for summer sightseers and tourists wanting a snow experience.

He suggests that in the shelter of Delta Corner the snow could be banked and stored so that a snow play and tobogganing area could be in use from May until February.

As a single resort, Whakapapa-Turoa could do things that neither field would be big enough to do on its own. An example might be hosting international events, which get huge television exposure but which tie up large parts of the field.

That wouldn't matter if there was a lot more terrain for regular customers to use.

Nor would customers be upset if one area was developed with a series of international-standard halfpipes for snowboarders while another area was restricted exclusively to children.

Mazey gets a little excited when he talks of the developments he would like to see in the Iwikau Village, an area unique to New Zealand with a management-plan provision for a 1600-bed alpine village with ski-in-ski-out accommodation.

The construction of a sewerage scheme, piping sewage to a treatment plant in Whakapapa Village, is likely to start next year.

It means that Iwikau, which has been described as something like Australia's Thredbo resort in the 1950s, will have the potential for redevelopment that is more in keeping with the modern planning dictums of limiting environmental impacts.

For instance, clubs that are struggling for members and finance might elect to amalgamate and build one lodge where the members are shareholders and the accommodation is managed for public use, like the condominiums at overseas resorts.

"This place is the result of 50s and 60s thinking," says Mazey, "but we have an opportunity in a 10-year time frame to start to set this village up so that over the next 50 years it will develop as an alpine village that will be a lot less intrusive on the national park and yet have the same 1600 beds.

"We have something unique in New Zealand that is completely under-used. We want to make sure it is used.

"You can get here from the airports at Taupo or Palmerston North in times that are comparable with the travel time to resorts in Canada or Colorado."

Mazey sees the Iwikau Village offering on-snow accommodation, National Park catering mainly for the backpacker market, Ohakune becoming a premier winter resort town, and the Taupo-Turangi area providing for groups that want to mix and match various activities.

"We have a great opportunity here to develop an international resort area where people can combine skiing with fishing, golf, Maori culture and such," says Mazey.