Me @ Mount Hutt - Day 1
We'd watched the storm come in over the weekend, closing the mountains and dumping 50cm of fresh (allegedly). Monday was all set to be an awesome start to my season.
Has always seemed a bit ridiculous driving up there myself midweek, so this season I'm using Snow Pool to try and fill the car up and split fuel costs (which are now $45 there and back, loads more than last year!). So 3 of us got up there by 9ish, having needed chains from the bottom. Car park almost full already!?! 
Hang on, this is a Monday. Seems most of Christchurch had pulled a sickie, with the promise of a bluebird powder day. Lifts not running on arrival, but they got the quad going soon enough. Going up the first lift and watching others coming down - erm, so where's all this powder then? That sounds and looks pretty hard to me. Yep, so sure enough the wind had been so strong it had compacted everything down and blown the rest off the top and over to the mountains the other side. If only they'd built Mt Hutt a few further back!
It was around 1pm before they got the Summit Chair going. Plenty of theories as to why they couldn't sort this out, but I reckon most of it's due to the fact that they left the chairs attached all weekend, so ended up with 30cm of "rhime" (windblown ice) on them. Lift queues all day, plenty of hiking but not much in the way of powder at the end of it. Still, sun was shining and was great to be back on board.
Massive lift queues!
Alain got the better of me around 4pm, time to chill (or heat up) in front of the fire before a painfully slow drive home. Pesky chains making too much noise and iPod ran out of juice 
There it is then, Winter Season number 3 in NZ begins...bring it on!