Saturday was opening day at Coronet Peak in New Zealand and hordes of mostly locals turned out to ski the best opening day snow conditions since 1996. The weather was great in the moring but detoriated a little during the day with some cloud drifiting in and the odd light snow flurry late in the day.
I got to have a good hoon around on the Salomon Aero GTs and see what they were capable of and was happily surprised. As they are a hybrid ski I was not really sure what I was in for but found them to be a very good on piste ski with excellent edge control and if you wanted to work them hard they responded well and left trenches in the snow. On the other hand backing off and just relaxing was also rather nice, you did'nt have to work them hard all the time to get good results! Being more of an on piste ski I ws quite surprised at how easily they dealt with the off piste which was quite changeable from nice chalky windblown powder and manky windcrust, they just seemed to eat it up. I will wait for a chance to ski them in deep powder and let you know how they respond to that challenge.
I was up on Coronet Peak again today and it was a blue bird day, quite cold with great snow conditions and the skiing was all go. My run of the day was dropping into Mid Exchange cutting back to the Hurdle and then dropping into West Gates. Lots of nice chalky snow and pockets of windblown powder, lovely!
The coming week looks like it wil start fine and slowly detoriate mid week and a chance of snow as a front bears down on us from a northly direction. With luck the mantle of snow on the Southern Alps will help drop the temperature and snow will arrive rather than the form of precip we don't want, I am not even going to use the word! With luck it will hit the cold Southerly airstream that we have and realy dump!
I didn't gte the chance to shoot any footage but wil pop up 2moro morning for a early ski (day's off) and shoot some and upload something later this week.
Certainly ifi you are um and ahhing about going skiing - nows very good and I think it wil continue to get better and better. as the season rols on! Here's hoping.
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