Photo: Temple Basin
When New Zealand’s Temple Basin Ski Area announced it would be closing down for the winter, the door was left open for the snow gods to intervene and offer local backcountry enthusiasts the occasional weekend turns.
“If the snow gods do grace us with a mega storm in the coming month, it is possible we will look to spin tows and run a pop-up weekend, dependent on volunteer and staff availability,” resort officials said at the time.
Sure enough, the snow gods sent enough snow this past week to turn a dry winter with no skiing or snowboarding at Temple Basin into a solid spring. A midweek storm dropped about a foot and a half of snow in the area and Temple Basin was able to spin its lifts for a season comeback with the help of a handful of employees. Temple Basin Ski Area president Peter Marriott told The Press that about 50 people showed up to ski and snowboard on Saturday and Sunday.
“It was simply fantastic. Really good snow with really good people, and lots of smiles and laughing,” Marriott said.
Images from Temple Basin this past weekend show a stark difference from the barely dusted grounds of a few weeks ago. There were plenty of bare rocks in late August when Temple Basin said it would be closing down for the season, but most of those rocks were nowhere to be found in images from this weekend.
View this post on Instagram
Conditions are now expected to take enough of a turn that Temple Basin will continue spinning lifts on weekends. Still, that won’t make up for what some have called an “abysmal” winter in parts of New Zealand.
“Mountains in the north of the South Island have been particularly bare of snow this season. The Mahanga Range site in Tasman saw less than half its average winter snowfall, as did mid- to lower-elevation sites throughout the South Island. Crawford Knob and Murchison Mountains had their lowest winter snowfall totals on record, with 1.92m and 0.46m respectively,” Hydrological forecasting scientist Dr Jono Conway said earlier this week.
