Day one – Falls Creek, Australia
Wow… What a start at Falls Creek….
The weather was awful. Load cloud / fog, a howling gale and driving snow. It was also very cold. Not many lifts were open and most of the mountain was closed.
We bought our ski pass ($240 (Australia) for 3 days, no photo required) at the base lodge and grabbed breakfast (actually breakfast took some time as I ordered a full breakfast – Snowlands). Two of the group went off for ski lessons.
From the base lodge we took a chair to the top of the mountain. If the weather was bad at the base it was unbelievable at the top! The wind was blowing so hard that we could not make ourselves heard. We did a couple of runs, stopped for an early lunch, and did a couple of more runs after lunch. The weather was so bad we couldn’t really make out which run was what and where it was going. Interestingly a number of runs were closed off with ropes and yet people were clearly still skiing them.
On one of the last runs (a green – Rudi’s – trail map) I found an Australian skier that had crashed in to a small stream that had appeared on the slope. I helped her to her feet and was surprised to discover that she couldn’t even snow-plough. I was very surprised that she had come up to the top of the mountain in such bad conditions when she clearly couldn’t ski…. but this sort of thing seemed to be part of a developing theme and may in fact help explain the large number of plastered limbs I had seen the night before (see post).
By mid-afternoon I had had enough of the appalling conditions and decided to get the lift back down. The lift (Bilia Bullet – trail map) broke down and I was left swinging in a howling blizzard for 15 minutes.
Having spoken to a couple of people at the base it appears that Falls Creek has a problem with lifts being struck by lightening (the one I was on that stopped had been struck a couple of weeks ago and was now experiencing regular breakdowns) and a few lifts (e.g. Summit – trail map) have been broken for most of the season.
No photos taken as the weather was too bad… (see later posts, for example this post, for some pictures).
Falls Creek, Australia – map it
[...] been very well groomed and the slopes repaired. The stream from which I pulled a ski out yesterday (post) had been filled in, and a number of areas that had been skied-off were looking better. Considering [...]