Snow Skills

For those who just don’t get enough skiing and riding in one winter, heading to the southern hemisphere is a good opportunity to extend one’s skiing/riding season right through the year. I’ve been fortunate to teach skiing for over 14 years now and one of the highlights is surely spending a season Downunder teaching skiing at Perisher Blue, the largest ski area in Australia.

Perisher Blue is a huge ski area in New South Wales, generally between Canberra and Melbourne in the southeast corner. That area and Tasmania are the only two areas that habitually get snow in the hottest, driest, and flatest continent on earth. Perisher Blue has over 50 lifts and 200 trails (and countless off-piste), making it the largest ski area in the southern hemisphere by those measures.

Perisher Blue was formed in the early nineties by interconnecting four adjacent ski areas; Perisher, Smiggins, Guthega, and Blue Cow. There are three ski school departments in the Perisher Blue Ski School; Perisher, Smiggins, and Blue Cow (where I taught). Almost one quarter of the ski school staff were exchange instructors like myself, from all over the planet including the USA, Canada, Austria, Switzerland, France, Italy, New Zealand, Slovenia, and Germany.

One of the most amazing things about teaching skiing in Australia is that the majority of Aussies have never even seen snow before, much less learned how to ski on it. The first five minutes of an Australian Start To Ski lesson is basically spent walking through the group with a handful of snow, explaining that it’s just frozen water. After a few glazed looks, I had alot of respect for the Australian sportsperson: they’d get right down to business learning how to conquer a weather condition on the same day they met it! Making snowmen, snow angels, and their first snowball fight were all part of the experience and it was awesome to watch the Aussies get comfortable in those surroundings so quickly. As they would say, Good on Ya!