View from the top of the Curvey Basin lift at The Remarkables, looking down to the Wakatipu Basin and the Southern Alps. Photo / Supplied
View from the top of the Curvey Basin lift at The Remarkables, looking down to the Wakatipu Basin and the Southern Alps. Photo / Supplied
James Russell is amazed during a trip to Queenstown to discover that since he last grasped poles, Kiwi skifields have lifted their game higher than the Matterhorn.
Back in the day, a trip to the mountain used to go a little something like this: first, the long trip behind the Maui camper up the rutted and icy road, punctuated only by an episode during which the air was turned as blue as Dad's freezing knuckles, which forcefully and repeatedly met the steel hub of the wheel as he wrestled with the tyre chains.
Then, of course, the queue for the ticket office, where impatience to get up the mountain slowed time to a tortuous crawl.
Hiring skis? Expect delays. There was no better motivation for shelling out the dollars to own your own gear than the queue to hire them (surpassing, even, the faintly damp smell of the previous day's skier's foot).
Queues and more queues awaited up on the slopes. During the school holidays a 20-minute wait for the T-bar was considered reasonable.
Then, back to the cafe where even the memory of the queues from last year was so painful your parents were "never doing that again" so you sat outside munching the paste your sandwiches had become from multiple crushings in your backpack thanks to the morning's mishaps.
If there was a soundtrack to those days it would have been that of children crying.
Curiously, however, it all conspires to conjure sepia-tinged and fond memories of the old days of skiing. The reason people ski - the thrill of high speed, the exhilaration of being in the mountains, the satisfaction of a holiday spent in activity - were all present. Yet, having just experienced the future, there's now no going back.
When I was invited for three days of skiing in Queenstown at Coronet Peak and The Remarkables, I calculated I'd had just three skiing days in the entire past 15 years, one of which had ended in a rotator cuff injury.
Snowboarding at Coronet Peak. Photo / Brandon Stanley, NZSki
This first day at The Remarkables, 25 minutes from Queenstown, began with some promise. The beginning of the mountain road was sealed, eventually giving way to a metal road so wide and smooth it also may as well have been.
Apparently $45 million has been invested here in the past year and it shows first in the base building, which brings to mind a stealth bomber. Sleek, spacious and ultra-modern, it is designed to streamline all the above processes.
Resigned to a long wait in the rentals area, I was surprised by a five-minute run through the Performance Rental section where, for a few bucks extra, you get this season's gear. My boots were top-of-the-range and new, as were my carbon poles; and my Volkl XTD skis had been tuned the night before. I had $2500 worth of rock-star gear for the day. If the skis don't suit, bring them back and swap them for another set.
Back in the day, I used to tear through the Ruapehu crud with a mixture of pride and cold terror on my Atomics - 210cm of knee-wrecking danger. Now, my Volkls were just 178cm and served to strip away the non-skiing years in just a few hours.
Despite the relentless air traffic at Queenstown Airport and the legions of Aussies up the hill due to their school holidays being a week earlier than ours, lift queues were non-existent - perhaps due to the absence of T-bars on The Remarkables. It seems that this mode of uphill transport is going the way of the dodo - there is just one among the lifts at Coronet Peak too. Instead, they're being replaced by the likes of the Curvey Basin chairlift, which speeds six people at a time to a point higher on the hill and in less time than the old model.
It opens up more terrain, too, with slopes suited to all levels. If you're up for a bit of a hike - no more than 10 minutes - there's anything from a hair-raising, 45-degree snow chute, to a broad, ungroomed bowl that finishes so far below the field you have to catch a shuttle back to base.
Perhaps the streamlining process is best epitomised by the Queenstown locals who arrive at 8am each day at Coronet Peak for First Tracks, then head back to town for the day's work.
First Tracks is the optional hour in which skiers can pay to have the mountain almost to themselves, because the rest of the day's skiers aren't up the mountain until 9am. At that time of the morning the wide groomed slopes are perfectly sculpted racetracks and huge fun (often the off-piste terrain is a tad hard at that hour).
Coronet is the mellower sibling of Queenstown's two closest ski fields, with rolling terrain dotted (at this early stage of the season) with tussock rather than rocks showing through the snow. It's perhaps the choice of the two for families, yet both fields are equally easily negotiated - on the hill and at base. The building at Coronet in particular is enormous and can happily house a mountain's worth of people if the weather turns to custard.
In my lengthy absence from the sport of skiing, all of New Zealand's ski fields may well have evolved in this way and I'm keen to find out. It's a welcome change and brings us closer to the United States and Europe experience that international travellers expect.
