Wanaka's skifield industry is in full swing. Matthew Haggart takes a behind-the-scenes look at the resort's skifield lifestyles and profiles six personalities involved with different aspects of the industry.
Ross Palmer
Age: 48.
Works: Snowsports NZ CEO.
Born: Boston, Massachussetts, US.
Lives: Lake Hawea, with wife Sharon and son Pierson (5).
Background: Began career as a sports journalist with various United States papers, including the Washington Post, before he formed his own public relations firm and became communications manager of Vail ski resort, Colorado.
Emigrated to New Zealand in 2005 and started with Sparc.
Raising the profile of New Zealand's snowsports athletes is crucial to ensuring the sport gets the public recognition it deserves, says Ross Palmer.
Mr Palmer is the chief executive of Snowsports New Zealand - the Sparc-funded body responsible for the various alpine disciplines of winter sport.
Alongside building snowsport's profile, Mr Palmer is also in charge of the annual grind to secure funding to implement the different high-performance and coaching programmes.
These are vital to ensuring there is a pathway for people wanting to choose snowsports as a viable competitive career, Mr Palmer believes.
Snowsports NZ receives between $3 million and $4 million in annual funding from Sparc.
The money was shared between the different snowsport disciplines of alpine ski-racing, snowboarding, cross-country skiing, free-ski, and adaptive snowsports, he said.
The Boston native is a self-described sporting nut, who emigrated to New Zealand in 2005 with his wife and son.
The family now called Lake Hawea home, Mr Palmer said.
Snowsports NZ has had a busy year so far, with an office move across town coming less than a year after the sports body made the decision to move from Christchurch and set up a home base in Wanaka.
The move to the mountain resort has put the CEO and his small administrative team "into the thick of things" during the busy winter season.
The administration body has a busy competition schedule, with this week's Adaptive and Disabled Snowsports Festival leading into the NZ Freeski Open and FIS World Cup snowboarding event.
The implementation of high-performance programmes and providing training for coaches was also crucial to providing athletes and up-and-comers with a pathway to success, he said.
Jackie van der Voort
Age: "40-something".
Works: General manager Treble Cone Skifield.
Born: Dunedin, NZ.
Lives: Gorge Creek, near Alexandra.
Background: Started working seasons at Treble Cone in the mid '80s and now spends eight months a year planning for the four-month annual skifield operation period.
Lives on a farm and spends about six weeks managing an orchard packhouse during summer "holidays".
You could say Jackie van der Voort is the first lady of New Zealand's expanding skifield industry.
The general manager of Treble Cone Ski Area has worked her way up through the various operational and commercial positions to head a team of more than 200 workers in a male-dominated industry.
She is the only woman in the country, if not the world, in charge of skifield operations - "I think there is another lady managing a skifield overseas".
Mrs van der Voort started at the bottom rung of the operational ladder spending "over half" her life working at Treble Cone and has been involved at every step of the skifield's expansion.
Working first collecting road tolls, back when people had to pay to drive up the skifield road, she has "cleaned more than a few toilets", worked as a lift operator, helped build the first tow-bar into the saddle basin, replaced it with the existing four-seater chair, and took on the role of commercial manager in 2000.
She has also presided during a period of intense criticism in the past two years when rising operational costs forced a price hike for season and lift passes.
Mrs van der Voort said criticism was something that went with the territory.
"We're not ashamed of our prices."
Treble Cone offered a product and service that was "second to none"and this had been reflected in the number of awards the skifield had won for its customer service and delivery, she said.
"You just have to deal with the criticism and move on. We've upgraded our facilities during the years and operational costs have increased in the interim. You have to make business decisions," she said.
Mrs van der Voort was having her first day off since the operational season began with staff training, more than five weeks ago when the Otago Daily Times spoke to her on Thursday.
"It's a challenging job and busy, but the people involved make it worthwhile and everyone involved with the mountain becomes like an extended family."
The Medic
Dr Lucy O'Hagen
Age: 45.
Works: Doctor at Aspiring Medical Centre, Wanaka.
Born: Winton, Southland.
Lives: Hawea Flat, with husband Dr Simon Brebner and sons Johnny and Fergus.
Background: Has spent 20 years involved with medicine and has worked for the past 14 years at Aspiring Medical Centre alongside her husband.
The keen skier hits the mountain slopes whenever possible and, "touch wood", has managed to avoid injuries.
Dr Lucy O'Hagen often feels like she specialises in ruined holidays, come winter.
Her workplace, Aspiring Medical Centre, is typically over-run with patients at the end of every day as injured skiers and snowboarders make their way down from the mountains.
Broken wrists are the most common injury she deals with, predominantly from snowboarders without wrist guards.
Staff can carry out between four to 10 X-rays to check injuries.
Despite the constant stream of broken bones and wrenched ligaments through her surgery, Dr O'Hagen says she makes it up the mountains whenever possible to go skiing with her family.
"One of the biggest challenges can be getting home," she says, with long winter hours the norm as the daily evening rush of injuries starts to filter in from about 3.30pm.
"Technically, it can be quite interesting. I can't say it's fun, because from a patient's point of view picking up an injury is often the worst thing possible for them - especially if it's day one of their holiday."
The groomer
Dave Collett
Age: 42.
Works: Head of Cardrona skifield's grooming and terrain-shaping team.
Born: Gore.
Lives: Hawea Flat, with wife Sharron and sons Mitchell (8) and Ruben (4).
Background: Comes from a forestry and machinery background and runs a silage contracting business during summers.
In charge of a seven-strong team at Cardrona skifield where he has worked for the past 17 winters.
Dave Collett laughs at the suggestion he is crazy when asked about the hours he works.
"Yeah, they're pretty inhospitable.
My wife refers to herself as a skifield widow," he says.
Mr Collett has overall responsibility for the grooming and terrain-shaping team at Cardrona skifield.
Once the snow arrives the grooming and shaping team can work through the night getting everything ready on the slopes.
Three members focus on grooming trails, with another three specialising in the shaping of freestyle terrain features, such as Cardrona's new Olympic-standard 22ft halfpipe.
Normal hours are between 4pm and midnight, but "if the snow keeps coming, you don't stop".
There is an "art" to the shaping of the skifield's terrain and it does not take long to develop a real passion for it, he said.
However, the nightly hours spent preparing the trails often felt like a "thankless task" once people hit the slopes.
It could take as little as 10 minutes for skiers and boarders to completely track out a freshly-groomed run, Collett said.
The self-described farm boy, from the Black Hills near Gore, had a rural outlook on how he managed the skifield's grooming.
"I treat it a lot like a farm. The people on the mountain are the sheep and the trails we groom are like their paddocks," he said.
The film-maker
Tim Pierce
Age: 21.
Born: Papua New Guinea.
Lives: Wanaka.
Background: Mixed his love of outdoor sporting action with photography skills and started taking pictures of his snowboarding and mountain-biking high school friends.
Moved into digital camera work and film-making, and has released a feature film, and produces 40 episodes of snowsport programmes during the winter.
Wanaka film-maker Tim Pierce believes he is a product of his environment.
"It's a breeding ground for extreme sports, with the mountains and everything on hand."
Mr Pierce (21) spends a hectic winter juggling different commitments, filming, editing and producing about 40 episodes of snowsports action for television and the Internet.
The fledging film producer found his calling at Mount Aspiring College, in Wanaka, where he began photographing his friends during extreme sports excursions into the mountains.
Not a lot seems to have changed in that respect, with Mr Pierce still accompanying the likes of elite professional snowboarders and former school friends Mitchell Brown and Tim Jackways as they compete in events and ride the back country mountains.
Mr Pierce produces two weekly segments which screen on snowsports television programme Freeze TV and website NZsnowboard.com.
His twice-weekly segment MDTV features a news item and profiles on different athletes and their "missions".
He films events on skifields around Wanaka and Queenstown, such as the Burton Open, New Zealand Freeski Open, Snow Park's Quarterpipe Jam, and also the back country forays of the professional riders.
However, the work does not stop after capturing the live action, with Mr Pierce often holed up in his bedroom downloading and editing footage.
Pierce released his debut feature film How About It? last year.
The mountain-biking epic won a special jury prize at the New Zealand Mountain Film Festival.
He has a similar project in the wings for summer.
The athlete
Sarah Murphy
Age: 20
Works: Full-time athlete
Born: Banff, Alberta, Canada
Lives: Canmore, Alberta, with her parents. Travels to compete.
Background: Competes in the biathlon - a crossover sport combining the two disciplines of Nordic skiing and target shooting.
Has dual Canadian and New Zealand citizenship from her mother.
Canadian convert Sarah Murphy literally has her sights set on representing New Zealand at future Winter Olympics.
The 20-year-old competes in the alpine sport of biathlon and is just coming to grips with her newly acquired kiwi status.
When the Otago Daily Times caught up with her this week, she had just notified Canada's biathlon sporting body that she was switching allegiance to represent New Zealand on the world stage.
Biathlon was introduced as a sport by the Scandinavians, where the combined disciplines of Nordic skiing and shooting were a throwback to compulsory military training.
Murphy said she picked up the sport when she was 14 and made the decision to switch to New Zealand - she has dual citizenship from her mother - because of the opportunities to develop the sport here.
"I've got more qualifying opportunities to compete internationally as a New Zealand representative and there is so much scope here to really push and develop the sport," she said.
Murphy is one of the top-ranked international juniors and is stepping up into open grade competition this year.
For the past two months she has been based at the Snow Farm, on the Pisa Range, training in preparation for the northern hemisphere world cup circuit.
"I feel like I can do something to help promote the sport here in New Zealand, rather than just competing by myself and for competition's sake," she said.
While she enjoys the marksman discipline of her sport over the aerobically challenging ski racing, her .22 rifle is saved purely for the target range.
"Oh no, I wouldn't dream of shooting anything else," she said when the question was put to her.
"Hunting is definitely a no go. But . . . I do love my guns," she said.
