Paul Anderson: NZ Ski CEO on the opening of Queenstown's skifields tomorrow

Skifields in Queenstown have got the chair lifts turning ahead of opening day tomorrow. 

NZ Ski Chief Executive Paul Anderson says the Remarkables and Coronet Peak have had eight solid days of snow making, mixed in with natural snowfall. 

He says there's more than a metre of snow on the main trails and both skifields should have their main chairlifts running, providing a chance at top to bottom skiing across the mountain. 

Mount Hutt attempted to open this morning but rainfall caused the snowpack to become unstable, pushing launch day to tomorrow. 

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The ski season kicking off this weekend, and joining us
this morning is Paul Anderson. Paul's with NZ Ski, the
chief executive. Paul, Good morning, Paul. Can you hear me?

Speaker 2 (00:12):
Hear me?

Speaker 1 (00:13):
Oh? There we go, gotcha? So what's happening? How much
snow we got?

Speaker 2 (00:17):
Yeah? Look, we're looking really good down in Queenstown at
the Remarkables and Corny Peaks. We had a storm rolled
through late last week dropped about twenty to thirty centimeters
in our mountains. But more importantly, we've had a good
eight days solid of snowmaking and we've got some pretty
incredible snowmaking systems down here. So we've got up to

(00:40):
a meter of snow now on our main trails and
looking good for openly non Saturday.

Speaker 1 (00:44):
Fantastic. And what's the situation like with all of the lifts?
Are they all working and good all that kind of thing.
You're all ready to go from a business both side
of it.

Speaker 2 (00:54):
Yes, absolutely, We've had a busy summer getting everything ready
maintain and doing all our maintenance on our lists and
snowmaking systems and so forth. So we for day one
we're going to be running with top to bottom skiing,
not all lists will be open. That's usual for the
start of the season. But where we're going to have

(01:14):
a current peak, our current Peak Express, which means we
can get our skiing top to the bottom and get
all the way to the top of the mountain and
have some great scheme and similarly over its remarkables Kurvey
based Express and the Alta Chairlift are both going to
be running.

Speaker 1 (01:30):
Yeah, and you've got because there's the expansion happening right.

Speaker 2 (01:34):
Yeah, looks that's work we've been doing. We've got aspirations
to push the remarkables over to the next valley in
the coming years. We've got an application and the fast
tracked process and working hard to make sure we can
get all those studies done towards the end of the year.

Speaker 1 (01:53):
Fantastic, Paul Goodlick. How is the Is the fast track
process easy? Because it sounds like it should be easy
because it's got fast on the front of it, but as.

Speaker 2 (02:00):
Actually it does well. Yeah. Look, the thing with the
part trek process is that brings all the hard yards
up front, so for us it means we have to
do a lot of studies rightfully. So once you've got
the information ready, we expect it to be really efficient
dealing with just that one agency, the Environmental Protection Agency.

(02:21):
So yeah, maybe talk to me this time, Nick Chair
and we'll see how we're going. But I'm hopeful of it.
The signals from the government are that they really want
these projects to get off the ground.

Speaker 1 (02:34):
Nice one, Paul. Great to have you on the show.
Paul Anderson, who's with us the indeed SKI chief executive.
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