Perisher

The biggest ski resort in the Southern Hemisphere

Perisher, called Perisher Blue until 2009, is the largest ski resort in the Southern Hemisphere. It lies in the Australian Snowy Mountains and is really four villages and their ski fields joined together, Perisher Valley, Smiggin Holes, Guthega and Blue Cow, covering about 12 square kilometres between them. Since 30 March 2015 it has belonged to Vail Resorts of the United States, which paid approximately AU$177 million for it.

The skiing

The skiing tops out at 2,054 m on Mount Perisher. Our data puts the base at 1,605 m (Wikipedia gives the base elevation as 1,720 m), so the vertical is under 450 m. That is a modest figure, and Perisher compensates with breadth: 65 km of pistes and 47 lifts across the four areas (Wikipedia’s inventory counts 45). That inventory shows what the fleet is made of. At the top end there is the Village Eight Express, an eight-seater chairlift built in 2003, a high-speed six-seater, two detachable quads, five fixed-grip quads, a triple and two doubles; below that comes a long tail of eighteen T-bars, two J-bars, seven carpets and two rope tows. The run difficulty split is 22% beginner, 60% intermediate and 18% advanced, which makes the mountain ideal for skiers still building confidence and less compelling for experts hunting steep pitches. The inventory also explains the scale: 45 to 47 lifts for 65 km is a dense network, roughly one lift for every 1.4 km of piste.

Skiing between 1,600 m and 2,050 m in Australia is not the same proposition as it is in the Alps, and 240 snow guns covering 4.4 square kilometres of the resort are there to make the season dependable. The official season runs from the second weekend in June to the first weekend of October, with July and August the main skiing months.

Getting up the mountain

Perisher is reached by road from Jindabyne or by the Skitube, Australia’s only underground rack railway, which runs from Bullocks Flat into the resort at Blue Cow. Our data flags the resort for après-ski, modern lifts and scenic views, and the chairlift roster above bears out the second of those: the eight-seater and the high-speed six-seater are the kind of uplift you would expect in a large Alpine or North American resort, not a regional hill.

Practicalities

Canberra (CBR) is the nearest airport in our data, roughly 140 km away as the crow flies. Lift status, passes and Skitube details are on the resort’s official website.