To get up to the Broken River skifield, you had a choice of taking the lift up or hike. The hike would take about 45-60 minutes. The lift used to be an equipment lift only and you had no choice but to hike up. It is only in the recent 5 or so years that they made some security changes to the lift so it could start carrying people up the mountain as well.
The lift did not go all the way up though, it took us to the ticket booth, and then we had to hike up the stairs the last 15 minutes.
Broken River did only have the “nut cracker” lifts, some of them were a real pain to get on, they ran fairly quick and there were a technique you had to master to get on them. Once you are on, you are scared shitless that the roller things will cut off your fingers, or a strap from your bag will get stuck.
Here is the actual nut cracker
It was hard to get a decent lunch at many of the places, especially when you are picky with your food like me. Here is a typical ski bum lunch: bag of chips and a chocolate bar for me, meat pie, coca cola and snus for the boys.
The Kea is kind of like the pigeon of New Zealand’s mountains and forest, but much more beautiful and not as gross. They hang out wherever there is food, you shouldn’t feed them though, it would make them dependent of the human.
We skid all the way to the bottom of the equipment lift at the end of the day.
