Conditions Report
Report from 16 June, 2025
Winter never really leaves New Zealand’s Southern Alps.
So it’s only natural that daydreams of skiing are close in the mind of a Highcountry Kiwi.
And as New Zealand rides a sugar rush of opening weekends at commercial ski areas, one gnarly chappie sought turns in a far different corner.
The man on the mission is known simply as ‘Jimmy’. A ‘lifer’ on planks, his winter ‘bread’ comes courtesy of national telemark instruction. And he doubles as a glacier guide in Aoraki Mt. Cook National Park.
Trust a dude such as this to be well-familiar with the vast snowfields roosting majestically atop New Zealand’s Southern Alps.
Glacier flow, climbing, even New Zealand commercial skiing itself—literally and metaphorically, everything starts with these enormous crowns of perennial snow.
When snowing inches elsewhere, it is commonly depositing feet on the snowfields.
Jimmy’s ride to this particular glacier arm named Tasman is via a Mt. Cook Ski Plane. A kiwi by the name of Wigley invented retractable ski technology on a wheeled fixed-wing aircraft. And he did it right here on Tasman Glacier, which makes Jimmy’s lift a bit of a national icon.
The goal is to tour and ski the high zones surrounding the Tasman Glacier. It’s an arena ruffly 39 square miles in area–and mighty cold, whichever way it’s cut. If the plan is to succeed, an overnight at altitude is required. Kelman Hut will be the fortress of solitude for the impossibly hard, cold hours of dark.
Drop-off by plane, as well as the mission’s highest lines go down whiskey-smooth, and twice as tasty.
A skin track is set, and it’s on.
Snowpack is super dry, crystalline, and layered to a depth of mid-calf. Quality carves transform into pure epic-ness in the solitude of these peaks.
If remaining up here was a viable option, people would be doing it already. But New Zealand’s Southern Alps are as inhospitable as they are spellbinding.
Hang out long enough and they’ll kill you. Soon, it’s high time to ski down the Tasman’s giant ice flow to arrive at the helicopter pick-up location.
Total transparency: there’s a long lower section that’s a gloopy, groove-tracked waiting game at best. It’s a four-hour commute, at minimum. And it ultimately passes into the home turf of crevasses and moulins.
It is a stage set with reminders that this place is a world apart, for the dangerous but for the better, too.
And if a single element stamps the seal upon the whole deal, it is sunrise.
One final skin-up takes place at break of day. Below waits that long, long line to the exit. And frankly, in this moment, the drop can wait.
Perched there, notched into a ski-cut step, the ice crystals of the super surface lightly cascade all around and down the face. They chime and tingle as they tumble, playing a tune to match a view which is distinctly, purely New Zealand.
