The Weather

06 July 2019 -

The school holidays are upon us and mother nature has blessed us with a plethora of crispy winter blue-sky days. Which would be lovely if she had firstly blessed us with a frenzied three-day blizzard bringing lashings of snow to the mountains. She has instead brought freezing temperatures to our night time toes and somewhat less freezing temperatures to the alpine peaks - insufficiently freezing for the snow guns to make up for the absent blizzard.

We often experience these temperature inversions in early winter. It’s the worst of both worlds. We are cold down the in valley but it’s too warm to make snow up on the mountains.

The skifield operators have done an admirable job of getting things up and running, but with thousands of families from both sides of the Tasman descending upon us and no sign of that blizzard, we shall have to keep our turns tight and our lunches long, least we further clutter the meagre pistes. For locals it’ll be the ski equivalent of family hold-back.

Worryingly, we are probably due a dud ski season. Certainly NIWA and the Metservice are predicting one due to warmer than usual ocean temperatures. One thing is certain though, it will snow at some stage. It’s just a matter of being on hand to avail oneself of its fluffy whiteness. In the meantime, there’s pizza to eat. No family hold-back required.