weekend warriors get the goods

Comment Share Posted on Monday July 18th at 2:40 p.m. Tweet

... after almost 2 weeks of stormy snowy conditions, Ruapehu's weekend warriors were treated to good times for the first weekend of the school holidays...

I spent my weekend at Turoa. On Saturday there was sunny blue skies, hardly any wind and soft dry snow all over! Parklane opened 1st up, and the Movenpick not long after. Unfortunately the ice encased Giant drive and return and the chairs and towers took a while longer to deice and faults finally foiled its opening (it opened Sunday). With the good clear calm conditions, it was a good chance to get disassembly of tower 6 on the High Noon started too.

The upper mountain trails were really only accesible by foot, but it didn't matter too much with all the snow down low. The lower mountain is loaded. The run of the day for me was lapping off the Movenpick or Parklane to the lower carparks exiting on the Once Only trail. There were no cars parked down there and no shuttle running to begin with, so my first hikes of the season ended up being from the bottom carpark up the Alpine Meadow !!

(Winter 2011)