Skiing in New Zealand

I recently went skiing in NZ for a week with some mates. Highlights were heli-skiing and quad-biking, lowlights included my dinging the hire car.

First picture is Cardrona, one of the four main ski areas accessible from Queenstown. It was quite busy despite the slope appearing empty, but had probably the best skiing of the groomed slopes.

Next is Treble Cone - easily the best view of the four over Lake Wanaka. You can make out the carpark in the lower-middle section; this photo was taken from near the top of the mountain.

This is me on the lift at Coronet Peak, around sunset. Coronet offered night skiing on the weekends, on pretty decent runs too - generally the night skiing areas in Australia are the baby green slopes.

 The Remarkables are the fourth ski area, but were fairly boring and had very slow lifts.

On to heli-skiing - this was our trusty seven-seater helicopter which ferried us around for the day. Naturally, being New Zealand, there were sheep on the helipad when we arrived. We went for seven runs total; essentially a whole day of skiing. The helicopter would quite literally take off and land within arms' reach of us once we were on the mountain - it took some getting used to. Not only that, but the guy would land it right on a peak and we would have to disembark and get our skis on in an area the size of a dining table with dead drops on each side.

Here we are above the clouds:

Looking around from there:



First slope of the day (we were the third of four groups, which is why there are some tracks):

View from the bottom of a run:

We also hired two GoPro cameras, which strap to your helmet and film as you go down. Sadly my head was too big for the camera to strap onto my helmet, but it meant I got filmed a lot via my friends following me. Unfortunately we ended up with about 35GB of footage which will take me a while to turn into something small enough and watchable enough to upload here.