A Standing Start

As I write, we’re approaching the end of the busiest two weeks of the season here at Treble Cone – the New Zealand July school holidays. We’ll have to wait and see what the numbers bear out but, anecdotally, it’s seems like a very successful start of the season for our resort. One month ago, this  seemed to be a remote possibility at best, and that’s worth an explanation.

Treble Cone was due to open for the season on June 23rd. With unseasonably warm and sunny weather for weeks beforehand, our opening was delayed two weeks due to lack of snow (in truth, the complete absence of snow). All but essential staff at the resort were laid off for the two weeks (“stood down”, in polite Kiwi parlance) and we were able to complete almost none of the prep work and training necessary to open to the public with all systems go. Thankfully, those two weeks were gloriously sunny and warm and I lulled myself into a routine of long walks and day hikes around town, daily trips to the gym, and a ritualized gaze across Lake Wanaka to see if our snowmakers had made progress.

Towards the end of two weeks of keeping ourselves busy in this most beautiful of places, it started to snow. A lot. For Six days. All day every day. Between about the 5th of July, Treble Cone received 2 meters of snow. That’s six and a half feet in six days, for the metric impaired. The snow fell so hard and fast, and at such low elevations, that the avalanche danger made our access road unsafe to travel if it had been passable at all. At one point, several key staff were actually flown into the resort by helicopter to get some work done! On several days, the rostered staff drove to the bottom of the mountain at our normal early hour and waited for clearance from our Ski Patrol doing avalanche work on the slopes above the road only to be turned around and sent home because of the danger. In a normally exceptionally snowy year, the snow line hovers just below the elevation of the base lodge at TC – a week after the storm ended, the snow line was still almost all the way down to the valley floor. 2 meters in six days, for crying out loud. After two weeks of looking nervously at a brown mountain we had so much snow that we couldn’t open the damn resort!

When we finally opened on Thursday, July 14th with only half the terrain available because of the avalanche danger, we got hit with a tidal wave of people. Our new sales software and lift pass system were still works in progress, the staff hadn’t been completely trained, the kitchen staff had to pull all-nighters to get the food prepped, and then every season pass holder, every dedicated powder hound, and every testosterone junkie in the Pacific Rim converged on Treble Cone all at once. It was nuts, and the skiing and riding was absolutely sick! Sweet as. Ridiculous. Genuinely epic. And the two week school holidays began that Saturday.

Honestly, the fact that we’ve been able to get the place up to speed, make our guests happy and generally operate the resort at the standard of excellence we expect around here in a credit to our amazingly dedicated staff. It borders on the miraculous, to be perfectly honest, and we’re all walking around gob-smacked by the turnaround.

The bags under our eyes and the sniffling by large number of our staff tells the story of how much work it took to make this happen and how trying the past month has been on all of us, myself included. To put a fine point on it, we’re all pooped. As I write, I’m enjoying my first day off in several weeks while yet another storm is roaring its way in to batter Treble Cone this afternoon and tonight. Things should ease up at work as we move through into August and business reduces from a rolling boil to a light simmer, and I’ll get to pick my head up and spend more time reminding myself why I love skiing at TC and with its people so much. In the meantime, I think I’ll take a nap. And dream of tomorrow’s powder.