Open for skiing action on Saturday
NZSki chief executive Paul Anderson says both The Remarkables and Coronet Peak will open as scheduled from 9am on Saturday, with the latter opening from top to bottom.
At Coronet, all the beginner conveyor lifts, the Meadows Chair and Coronet Express would be in action — Rocky Gully and Green gates would not be open, "but we'll be looking to add those in as soon as we can stitch that together".
At The Remarkables, the learners' conveyors, Alta and Curvey Basin would be open for action, with Sugar Bowl and Shadow Basin still to come, Mr Anderson said.
"Our whole objective in getting both mountains open on the same day is to send a really, really strong signal to the market that ... Queenstown's open for business, and hopefully you see that switch flipped and the town gets busy very quickly."
Mr Anderson said last weekend's perfectly timed snowfall had been supplemented by a huge amount of snowmaking, which he believed had been the longest period of snowmaking in Queenstown for a decade.
"And the new guns we've got up there, they are just incredible."
At The Remarkables, for example, the whales of snow from the guns were higher than the conveyor covers.
"It just gives you an idea of the amount of snow they were belting out."
He estimated Coronet was opening with between 60cm and 120cm on trail, and about 60cm at The Remarkables.
"We're kind of expecting the locals to come out in force once they hear how good the on-trail skiing is ... It'll be nice to get a bit of a dump before school holidays, but with or without it, we're going to have a good school holidays, I can see that."
Cardrona, which along with Treble Cone is owned by Queenstown-based company RealNZ, will also open on Saturday.
Chief mountains officer Laura Hedley said thanks to an "incredible effort" from the snowmaking team, and some help from Mother Nature, the McDougall's Chondola and the learner conveyors would be spinning.
Skiers and boarders would be able to access McDougalls' trail and the beginners' area from Saturday, while the North Face Cardrona parks crew would also put in a few features in McPark, the temporary early-season terrain park under McDougalls.
"Our new base area building is nearing completion, and we are aiming to get our new Cardrona Corner retail shop open on Saturday, too," Ms Hedley said.
To reflect the early season offering, Cardies day passes will be at early season rates until Whitestar Express opens.
Treble Cone is scheduled to open on June 28.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Otago Daily Times
2 hours ago
- Otago Daily Times
$100m ski area plans moving apace
An application for a $100 million-plus project that includes a 10-person gondola and extending The Remarkables ski area into the Doolans backblocks should be completed by the end of the year. NZSki, which also owns Coronet Peak and Mt Hutt, is setting aside finance for the venture, which has been selected for the government's new fast-track process. Once completed, its skiing and snowboarding terrain will likely more than double to about 900ha. The Fast-track Approvals Bill is expected to speed up the decision-making process for infrastructure and development projects considered to have strong regional or national benefits. NZSki chief executive Paul Anderson said detail studies for the project were being carried out with the goal to get the full application in by the end of this year. "We're on one of the schedules for the Fast-track Bill for an expansion to The Remarkables. So we are working very hard on that. Locally this area is known as the Doolans and that involves a gondola that will go all the way from the existing base facility up over a ridge and into the next basin, snowmaking, trails, and then, of course, we have to look at base building expansion because we will have more people coming up to enjoy that other valley as well." A start to construction would depend on the application process, he said. "All going well it will be the following summer when we would like to start to do the enabling work, which is starting to get the roads cut into so we can get up into over the next valley and perhaps doing some initial construction of the base station. "I would imagine a gondola of this scale, which is 2.3kmlong, would take two summers to construct." The Doolans' higher altitude to the southeast of the main runs would retain more snow for longer to provide insurance against climate change, he said. Within its existing scope, the project is expected to raise the mountain to an international ski destination, generate an estimated $350m in the regional economy and create more than 2500 new jobs. To proceed, the company needs to get a new concession agreement from the Department of Conservation, gain resource consents from the district and regional councils and carry out consultation with stakeholders including iwi. Mr Anderson said the fast-track process would provide the opportunity for all the consents to be processed simultaneously via the Environmental Protection Agency. It will be the company's largest project since $90m was spent on the last expansion at The Remarkables over the past 10 years. "This expansion will be upwards of $100m. We are owned by a local family and they are really ambitious to expand the ski areas and keep on doing what we can." Sir John Davies is the founder of NZSki under the parent company Trojan Holdings. Trojan's diversified businesses are mainly in the lower South and include the three ski areas, The Hermitage Hotel at Mount Cook Village, guided walks on the Milford and Routeburn Tracks as well as property and farming interests. He has built up the business since starting out with Whakatipu Transport, which merged into Northern Southland Transport Holdings. Mr Anderson said Sir John liked building businesses and making products better and was motivated by putting money back into them. Ongoing projects would continue at the other ski areas with a big focus on renewing or upgrading snowmaking equipment each summer. "The new technology for the new snowguns is far more efficient and produces more snow for lower cost, so that's a big push for us." Snowmaking at Mt Hutt was continuing under low humidity with temperatures at 5°C.
Otago Daily Times
2 hours ago
- Otago Daily Times
Australian holidayers set to hit the slopes
Australian holidaymakers are about to swell numbers on the slopes to about 10,000 visitors daily across NZSki's alpine trio of southern ski areas next week. The Australian influx combined with the school holidays and plentiful snow is set to lift the skier and snowboarder count at Coronet Peak and The Remarkables in Queenstown as well as Mt Hutt near Methven. Early snow allowed Mt Hutt to open on June 14 after a couple of false starts, while the southern mountains, boosted by snowmaking, opened the lifts on the same day. The 3000 visitors arriving daily at the twin peaks this week are set to rise closer to 4000, while Mt Hutt would increase to between 2000 and 3000 a day. NZSki chief executive Paul Anderson said offshore dollars arriving at peak weeks in the ski season were important for the company, nearby centres and local economies. "It's when we finally get in the black as we spend a lot of money through summer in marketing and maintenance and we hang on for this period to get us into the black. "It's positive as Australian visitors coming across are strong spenders. The Aussies who come over are on holiday and have a budget for their holiday and are going to spend it in retail, on rent skis and buy their lunch." He said advance sales were locked in for snow sports lessons, transport and equipment hire from Australia with bookings continuing through the season. "We've got New Zealand and Queensland on holiday and next week we get New South Wales on top of that, so next week will be our biggest week. Pre-bookings out of Australia are very strong with double-digit growth, so 50% to 60% growth in Australian advance sales." He said softer advance sales from the North Island should turn around once news travelled about Mt Hutt's deep snow base. Next week's influx would be nearing capacity, but high-speed lifts were equipped to keep queues moving, he said. Early snowfall followed by further top-ups had created a 1.5m base at Mt Hutt. "We've got the most snow we've had for this time of the year for probably 15 to 20 years and just superb conditions." Queenstown's ski areas had a dry beginning to winter until snowmaking over eight days allowed them to start on schedule. Mr Anderson said season pass holders had initially made the most of the Queenstown skiing in the first few weeks and visitor numbers were now up on last year after 30cm of snow landed last weekend to fill the mountain's lower section. Another 6000 Australians due to arrive for Snow Machine, a music festival at The Remarkables and Coronet Peak in mid-September, are expected to boost spring skiing. Later that month there will be celebrations for The Remarkables' 40th anniversary. The ski areas are scheduled to close on October 12, with Coronet Peak usually closing the access gates earlier.
Otago Daily Times
2 hours ago
- Otago Daily Times
IT experts developing revolutionary technology
Two New Zealand-based IT experts are working on a ground-breaking technology that promises to revolutionise computing by creating a computer inside a computer memory chip. The innovative project, known as SADRAM (Symbolically Addressing DRAM), is being developed in Oamaru and could dramatically change how data is processed worldwide. Dr Robert Trout and Nicolas Erdody bring more than a century's combined experience in information technology to the ambitious endeavour. Dr Trout is the original inventor of SADRAM, a new type of memory chip architecture that can organise, access and even process data internally — without relying heavily on traditional central processing units (CPUs) to micromanage operations. "This is a paradigm shift," Dr Trout said. "Instead of the CPU managing every step of data processing, SADRAM moves computing power closer to the memory itself." Nicolas Erdody, director of Open Parallel and a key partner on the project, elaborated on the current state of computing technology. "Multicore processors, with multiple CPU cores on a single chip, have been the norm in phones, laptops and supercomputers for decades," he said. "But this architecture has barely changed in 50 years, and CPUs have hit a performance wall." Mr Erdody said designers could no longer extract significant improvements or better efficiency using the old designs. "SADRAM's architecture addresses these limitations head on." The new "information architecture and concept" behind SADRAM was designed to boost performance, reduce energy consumption and streamline the computing processes that modern technologies demanded. By embedding computation directly within the memory chip, the technology could reshape everything from artificial intelligence to data centre operations. Mr Erdody's company, Open Parallel, was selected in 2012 by the New Zealand government to help design software for the Square Kilometre Array (SKA), the world's largest radio telescope project. The company worked on SKA until 2019. He also directs the annual Multicore World Conference held in New Zealand, which attracts leading global thinkers in computing innovation. Originally from Uruguay, Mr Erdody has lived in Oamaru for over two decades with his family. He met Dr Trout earlier this year at the Multicore World Conference in Christchurch, where the two "like-minded" experts decided to collaborate on further developing SADRAM technology from North Otago. "We're jamming like musicians in a band — when like-minded people come together, ideas flow naturally," Mr Erdody said from their shared office space at the Business Hive in Oamaru's Thames St. Dr Trout, who hails from Palmerston North but now lives in Hamilton after decades in the United States, holds the worldwide patent for the SADRAM concept. Over his career, he has built several tech companies and pioneered novel computing architectures. As founder and president of Pico Computing Inc (2004-15), he developed FPGA (field-programmable gate array) products widely used in cryptography, genetic analysis and CPU acceleration. "FPGAs can outperform conventional CPUs in many specialised tasks," Dr Trout said. "The real revolution in computing came in the 1970s when the industry shifted from discrete components to printed circuits, separating design from fabrication. This enabled exponential growth in computing power for the past 50 years." But he warns: "We are now hitting physical and quantum limits. We cannot keep squeezing more performance from the same old CPU-centric design." The pair are focused on designing cost-effective technology to overcome these challenges. Their plan includes creating a company, hiring experts and developing hardware kits — either manufacturing them or licensing the design to major industry players such as Samsung. "The big picture is to build a design centre in New Zealand that proves cutting-edge tech can be developed anywhere. We want to inspire future generations to innovate locally with global impact," Mr Erdody said.
