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Backcountry film festival 2015

Now in its 10th year the Winter Wildlands Alliance Backcountry Film Festival celebrates the human powered winter experience through film. The festival aims to entertain while helping to raise funds and awareness for Winter Wildlands and our like-minded partners.

The Backcountry Film Festival premieres in Boise, Idaho, and then travels to more than 100 locations worldwide.  Along the way, it will be viewed by more than 20,000 outdoor enthusiasts and raise more than $110,000 each year for local organisations working on advocacy, snow safety, outdoor education and Snow School programs.

Melbourne show

Thursday May 21, 2015

Cinema at RMIT. Building 80.

Level 1, Room 2, 445 Swanston Street.

Suggested donation: $8 conc & students/ $15 waged.

All proceeds go to the Friends of the Earth climate campaign.

Facebook page here.

The cinema is Room 80.01.02 (It can be hard to find, best bet is to enter off A’Beckett Street, just by the Oxford Scholar Hotel (map here). Building 80 is on Swanston, between Latrobe and Franklin street, opposite the main RMIT campus.

Feel free to meet at the Oxford Scholar for a drink from 6.30pm. Please aim to arrive at the Cinema around 7, we will start the films at 7.15pm.

The festival will also be shown during the 2015 Splitfest (splitboarding festival) being held in the Snowy Mountains, on friday August 22 in Jindabyne.

Please check here for a listing of the films being shown.

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Snow season forecast

Last winter started late but saw fantastic snowfalls and a solid snowbase for most of the season. As we move into autumn all us skiers, boarders and snow lovers are wondering what 2015 might look like. One of the best sources is The Grasshopper, who writes for Mountainwatch.

Grasshopper has written up their forecast for the 2015 season, and the take home message is that:

We’re heading for an El Nino and it’s got a good chance of being a strong one.

A winter dominated by a ‘classic’ El Nino event generally means poor snowfalls because “Big fat highs sit down on south-eastern Australia, suppressing cloud and holding the fronts and rain from the southern oceans at bay”.

But Grasshopper notes that there are two possible forms of El Nino, the other being the so-called “Wrong-uns”:

“When these turn up the higher pressures don’t eventuate and the lower pressures move north to encroach upon Australia. This is going to mean more frequent and/or stronger westerly winds, and the air in those westerlies is going to be sourced from the southern oceans. We won’t necessarily get more precipitation, but when it does arrive it should be colder, and so more likely to fall as snow”.

This is the first forecast of the season, but the prognosis is not great:

“… in the meantime my forecast of peak snow depth at Spencers Creek this winter is a paltry, pathetic and potentially petrifying 140cm, with the first 50cm storm waiting until late July to pay a visit. That would make it the worst year since 2006, another Classic El Nino through June/July/August that only managed 85cm peak snow depth at Spencers Creek.”

There is the hopeful observation that:

“we’ll always have a roll of the dice that a couple of big storms will turn up during August”. Let’s hope.

Stay tuned for Grasshopper’s next forecast.

You can read the full report here.

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Perisher resort sold

The Australian is reporting that the Perisher resort has been sold to the US-based Vail Resorts conglomerate.

Crown casino chief James Packer and another private company have sold the Snowy Mountains’ Perisher Ski Resort to America’s Vail Resorts for $176.6m.

The sale, by Packer subsidiary Murray Publishers and Transfield Corporate, includes the resort areas Perisher Valley, Smiggin Holes, Blue Cow and Guthega, along with ski school, lodging, food and beverage, retail, rental and transportation operations, the New York stock exchange-listed Vail said.

The deal will need approval from the NSW government.

Perisher, Australia’s largest ski resort, holds a long-term lease and licence with the NSW government under the National Parks and Wildlife Act, which expires in 2048 with a 20-year renewal option. Mr Packer’s private company, Consolidated Press Holdings, inherited 75 per cent of Perisher in 1972 when it acquired Perisher Smiggins and the Perisher Hotel through its purchase of Murray Publishers.

Full article here.

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World Telemark Day/ Splitboard Festival

Telemark Skier magazine, based in the US, is starting WORLD TELEMARK DAY.

They say:

“this inaugural event is a day for telemark skiers to get together and go telemark skiing. Wherever you might be around the world let’s gather at our local hills and drop a knee together!”

The Southern Hemisphere event will be on Saturday SEPTEMBER 5, 2015. Anyone interested in organising an event is welcome to do so: just post the details on the facebook page so other people can join you.

There will be a gathering at Mt Loch that day. We will meet in Mt Hotham resort in the morning, and ski to Mt Loch and Machinery Spur. Tele and AT skiers and splitboarders all welcome.

Some people will also be camping at JB Plain (between Mt Hotham and Dinner Plain) that weekend. You’d be welcome to join the camp. Just come fully prepared with food and gear for snow camping. There is a pub just a 2 km ski away if the need arises.

Splitfest DownUnder

And just a ‘date claimer’ for the 2015 Splitfest DownUnder festival.

It will be over the weekend of 21-23 August, in the Main Range of the Snowies.

Check the Splitfest website closer to the event for full details and to register.

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Dismantling ski lifts as the world warms up

The following is yet another story about the impacts of climate change on snow and ski resorts. The evidence of direct economic impacts continues to grow and while some resorts are heeding the call, a large number continue to ignore the issue.

Source: SBS News.

Global warming is likely to disrupt European ski resorts and cause more landslides and forest fires, affecting the agricultural sector and local economy.

With temperatures rising faster in the Alps than the rest of the world, alpine countries are working together to adapt to climate change and hope to set an example.

Continue reading “Dismantling ski lifts as the world warms up” →

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The Glass Half Full, 2014 Season Wrap-Up

The following is a good end of season reflection from Reggae Elliss, writing on Mountain Watch. As Reggae notes, mid-July offered the best snow of the whole season. It was seriously excellent. After much early hype about it being a terrible season, it ended up being a solid, but not outstanding one. Reggae goes into it in some detail. Those heady days of July seem like a life time ago. But I have to admit that I’ve also had some of my best ever spring skiing these last two weeks, on SE slopes on The Bluff, in Dargo Bowl and out at Mt Loch.

There’s a few days skiing in some of the resorts and substantial backcountry terrain still in reasonable shape. Hope you have a chance to get out there …

As I write, there is still two weeks to go until the “official” end of the season here in Thredbo. Despite the warm weather of the past couple of days, plus 20mm of rain forecast, it looks like we’ll have some lifts spinning until October 6.  Looking back on this winter, it’s a bit of a ‘glass half full’ scenario. The great snowfalls and powder days of July gave way to only minimal snowfalls in the past eight weeks with only two falls of over 10cm since July 18.

However, while we haven’t had that many powder days in the second half of winter, the snow has remained consistently good. August was a month of dry, chalky, packed-powder, cold sunny days and light wind. The past three weeks have also been good, with plenty of days of fun spring snow and sunshine.

Pre-season, all of the talk was about how an El Nino weather pattern was forming and this could mean a dry, cold winter, with minimal snowfall. Unfortunately, this sentiment gained a lot of traction when the opening weekend in June came and went without any natural snow, hardly any snowmaking and only one lift open in Australia, a t-bar to the second tower on Perisher’s Front Valley.

The media were having a field day, quoting all sorts of expert sources, all of whom concurred that 2014 was shaping up as a disaster with minimal snowfall. It could even be as bad as ’82. The ray of hope was our own Grasshopper, who wisely pointed out in his June seasonal outlook that it was too early to push the panic button and reminded us of his earlier seasonal outlooks published in April and May. In those, the Grasshopper emphasised that there are two variations of El Nino, the classic, dry cold version or the ‘Wrong ‘un”, a term the Grasshopper coined to describe an El Nino that spun the other way, delivering cold westerly air flows, low pressure systems south of Victoria and snow-bearing cold fronts.

It was too early to call at that stage, but he wasn’t jumping on the classic ‘El Nino’ bandwagon and was still leaning towards a ‘Wrong ‘Un” for the first half of the season and was calling for a snow depth max at Spencers Creek of 172cm and the first 50cm + storm coming in late June/early July.

As we now all know, that’s what happened.

You can read the full assessment on Mountain Watch.

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Is Backcountry the new Black?

In a recent post, I suggested that, in the last few years, I have seen more people getting out into the backcountry for skiing and boarding. I didn’t try to draw any conclusions about out-of-winter visitation, but it certainly seems to me that there is a new generation of backcountry skiers and boarders, and a growing number of snow shoers as well. These people are coming both from traditional resort users and also a more nature-enthusiast demographic as well.

I recently spotted some stats from the US based Outside magazine about avalanche risk, which seemed to underscore the trend that I see out on the slopes:

  • In the US, more people are getting out of resorts ‘than ever before’ (this includes skiers, boarders and snowshoers). The author of the article White Noise in the October 2014 issue of Outside, Christopher Solomon, suggest that ‘a tipping point has been reached, some say, and what was once a fringe subculture is now firmly mainstream’.
  • He puts this growth to a range of factors, including more resorts opening ‘sidecountry’ terrain, more focus on snowsports culture on getting out of the resort, more infrastructure – like guiding businesses – who can take inexperienced people out, and better equipment.
  • He notes that in the US, sales of backcountry gear has grown 85% over the past four winters.
  • He says that men in their 20s are the group that are making up the ‘largest demographic venturing into the backcountry’.

All of this is fairly consistent with what I see out on the slopes. And we have not come close to a peak as yet. I have lost track of the number of skiers, boarders, towies and other mountain enthusiasts I met this winter who have aspirations to get out of resort, but haven’t done it yet. The ‘collective consciousness’ of the snow sports community has shifted and more and more are looking beyond the tows. In light of this, Hotham resorts intention to investigate extending its lifted areas into prime sidecountry terrain seems doubly strange.

Most of the newer backcountry skiers and boarders I meet seem to be focused on getting out into steep terrain. But I also notice another crowd, who are enjoying ‘traditional’ XC skiing or snow shoeing. This group tends to be both younger and older than the ‘steeps freaks’.

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winter 2014

The winter that was. It started late. But, as they say, better late than never. And it’s almost over.

To quote snow forecaster Grasshopper, who writes for Mountain watch.

It’s been quite a season. You can say one thing for certain, it’s been a winter of extremes and the weather has kept us guessing. Possibly more so than in recent years, in my opinion anyway. We started, of course, with a very dry situation during early June. The official opening date of 7 June was once again, a tad optimistic, and around 12 June folks were getting a little panicky. Then POW. Snowmageddon hit, and nearly two metres of snow in a fortnight had the snow base sitting on around 130cm by early July.

That base saw us all the way through August and well into September in the higher country. And yes, there’s still lots of good turns to be found out there. Enjoy.

Here’s some images from my winter. Please feel free to send me your own for inclusion, or share them on the mountain journal facebook page.

Continue reading “winter 2014” →

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Mt Hotham land grab

The Mt Hotham Draft Master Plan has been released for public comment until September 12.

It maps how the resort management would like to see the ski resort develop in coming years. It proposes the creation of a series of ‘activity hubs’ in different parts of the resort, including a substantial increase in the footprint of infrastructure on the south eastern side of the resort in the snow gum forests that stretch towards the township of Dinner Plain.

There are some worrying suggestions in the plan relating to a potential expansion of ski runs and associated infrastructure into three new areas adjacent to the existing resort. All of these (identified as ‘areas to be investigated’) would see destructive development in sensitive alpine environments.

Continue reading “Mt Hotham land grab” →

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Low Snow on Long Plain

When people think of ski touring in the Snowy Mountains, its more than likely they will imagine the Main Range area around Kosciuszko itself, or the high plains that extend up to Mt Jagungal. But there is a lot of alpine and sub alpine country to the north of these iconic areas. With elevations dropping off as you head north, it can be a rare thing to have sufficient snow nowdays to travel by ski into the northern sections of Kosciuszko National Park.

But with 2014 being the fantastic season that it is, there has been plenty of opportunity to ski in some of the lower elevation mountain regions across SE Australia.

This trip report from Andrew Stanger is of a ski tour to Four Mile Hut from near the Selwyn ski resort.

You can read it here.

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Backcountry Awareness Presentation at Falls Creek

Falls Creek Ski Patrol is holding a Backcountry Awareness Presentation to be held this Saturday night the 9th of August at the Frying Pan Inn between 7 and 9pm.

Seats are limited so call Falls Creek Ski Patrol on 03 5758 1288 for bookings.

Mt Bogong from near Spion Kopje
Mt Bogong from near Spion Kopje

The night will consist of
·  a general presentation on backcountry awareness from both members of the Falls Creek & Squaw Valley Ski Patrol, including: How avalanches form, resort vs backcountry, personal equipment, weather / avalanche information sources when abroad, formal education resources for professionals and recreationists, avalanche transceiver use, probe line and search techniques, safe travel in avalanche terrain and snowpack analysis.

· the second part of evening will be a brief general summary of the recent Bogong Avalanche from Falls Creek Patrollers who assisted in search and recovery efforts – this will include a forensic review of the avalanche from a snow science and search and rescue perspective.

· After this there will be a couple of Backcountry short films – OFF GRID and Valhalla.

Also if anyone is interested in Field Workshops they should contact the Falls Creek Ski Patrol Base on for more information on 03 5758 1288.

· Donations for the night are going towards the set up of two Avalanche Rescue Hasty packs.

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Winter. Bring It (Again).

After a mild spell of weather over the past week and a bit, winter is due back today with stormy weather and snow down to 500m in Victoria tomorrow.

The snow base has been affected by the recent warmer weather, drizzle and rain, but without too much loss at higher elevations. We are certainly due for a top up. The recent weather will help consolidate the base, and with good falls expected in the next few days, hopefully we will be set up for a long end to the season, well out into the ‘official’ months of spring.

But, as always, we can never take anything for granted – especially snow. Mountain Watch’s snow forecaster Grasshopper warns ‘It may be some time before we’re talking another big dump’ after this one, so get out there if you can.

Check the BOM site for alpine forecasts or the Mountain Watch website.

[Main image: Pinnacle, on the summit of kunanyi / Mount Wellington, this morning 31/7/14]

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