Craigieburn Range

By joining up the sections outlined above, you can make longer tours. Mount Cheeseman skifield is centrally located in the range, and from there you can go to Craigieburn and back in a day, including skiing the basins between, or go to the Ryton valley and back in a day. Mount Olympus ski area is also a good base for ski touring with easy access to the Ryton valley. For a traverse, you could start at Craigieburn or Broken River, and tour to Mount Olympus in a day, stay the night at the Mount Olympus ski club lodge, and return the next day to Craigieburn, or vice versa. Make sure you have a good 2-day weather forecast, and phone ahead in advance to arrange accommodation of course. Alternatively, after travelling the first day from Craigieburn to Mount Olympus or Cheeseman, the next day travel over Mount Enys and all the way through to the Porter Heights skifield to cover the Craigieburn Range in a challenging and exciting ski weekend. A light overnight pack with sleeping bag and bivvy bag should be carried, along with some spare food and the usual backcountry emergency equipment including a shovel. A good early start, as soon as the lifts open, is usually the best plan. Leave written intentions, and always check in and out with the ski patrol. Competent and fit local skiers, who know the Craigieburns well, travelling fast, can cover the entire range in a day. With an early start from Porter Heights, for example, you can ski over Mt Enys, bypassing Mt Olympus, direct to the Mt Cheeseman skifield. If time, weather and conditions are on your side you can continue through to Craigieburn by the end of the day. From there you could try to hitch back, or get a ride with one of the transport companies. You’d need to phone ahead to organise this beforehand. If you’re at Cheeseman and you have decided not to go any further, then it will be too late to return to Porter Heights that day. Your options would be to either get a lift or hitch home from Cheeseman, or try to get accommodation for the night there. In any case, make sure that you phone the ski patrol where you started from (Porter Heights in this example) to tell them that you have safely arrived. A flexible option when doing a day trip is to leave your car beside the main highway at the bottom of a skifield access road, and hitch a lift up the skifield road. Then, after skiing to another ski area, you can catch a lift down from any of the skifields and be dropped off back at your car. Remember that the local skier traffic will mostly be going south, back towards Christchurch, in the afternoons, meaning that it’s easier to hitch in that direction in the afternoons. This would tend to favour a south-to-north direction of ski traverse for the sake of transport convenience. Another factor to consider is the quality of the skiing. A north-to-south direction of travel would mean you climb north-facing slopes and would therefore allow downhill ski runs on better quality snow on the south-facing slopes. If you can sort out the transport, this would be the preferred direction. If you are caught on the ridge in sudden nasty weather, and are forced to descend, the best way to go is to the east (i.e. heading for Highway 73). Be aware though of the terrain below you. There are waterfalls in some of these creeks (Waterfall Creek being one of these, of course) which can be a problem to get around on foot. However, if you are between Cheeseman and Broken River when caught out, don’t attempt to descend eastwards – there are bluffs just about everywhere. Instead you’d have to press on to either ski area, sheltering where practical from the worst of the gusts. The Canterbury the southerly storms are often violent to begin with, but the worst of the wind may pass within an hour or two, leaving conditions that, while far from comfortable, make ski travel and navigation possible.