Skiing in the Southern Hemisphere

To prove my ignorance of Australia, I was unaware of the possibility of skiing in Australia until this year. Since being enlightened to this opportunity, it was added to my ever-changing and often forgotten list of things I'd like to do in my lifetime.

I thought I had missed the opportunity, as it is warming up quickly here, but Owen (an Aussie who studied at UT last semester, strangely enough) was headed to the mountains on the last weekend of the season, and Alex and I thought we'd tag along.

The guys at the rental shop suggested we go to Thredbo mountain - which had the most terrain open. I won't lie to you and say it was great weather, on the contrary, it was 35 degrees with winds at 39 miles per hour (to put that into perspective, it's almost fast enough to be classified as a tropical storm). The wind had blown the fresh snow from the night before into dunes, leaving behind nice big patches of ice.

After mid-morning, the sun started poking through the cloud (which was actually the snow getting blown around), and we found an area of the mountain with decent conditions, and even a few trails with the previous night's powder still unskied. Most people had given up on the day due to the weather, so we had the advantage of empty slopes and no lift lines. All in all, everything about the day in the mountains more than made up for the less than perfect weather.