Skiing Australia

Skiing Australia

AUSTRALIAN ROAD-TRIP OR THE LIFE OF SKI JOURNALIST

Many skiers believe that I have the ideal job, and I must admit that I have no complaints. I travel around the world with my laptop and camera, exploring the best and the most exotic ski destinations on Earth. It is a wonderful life and I am grateful for it.
Even on a bad-weather day, as the wind and snow are abusing my exposed face on some mountaintop, I often say to whomever is on the chair lift next to me, “It still beats going to the office.”
Or as ski hall-of-famer and powder guru Alf Engen once told me as we stood upon one of Alta’s peaks, “Look around. This is my office. I am the luckiest man in the world.”
There is another side of the story of course. In the interest of trying to prevent passionate skiers who work desk jobs from committing suicide out of sheer envy or quitting their secure occupation to compete with me as snowsports journalists, I feel it is necessary to allow the whole truth to be documented.
It is 5:30 in the morning, and I am in front of my laptop at Mt. Buller, Australia, writing my first draft of a road-trip story. This road-trip has taken me for 58 days through 34 ski areas in Chile, Argentina, New Zealand and Australia. My travels included 40 days of skiing, three or four down days because wind kept the lifts closed, a handful of days for sightseeing, and many days of flying and driving.
This kind of itinerary is hardly what one could call a vacation—quite the contrary. I now need a vacation. I am up before dawn because this is the only viable time to do some writing on such a trip. The distances are often rather long between ski resorts, and after a hard day of skiing, we often must drive three or four hours to get to our next destination. Then we are in a rush to get…

The complete story is in the coffee table book Skiing Around Volume I the World by Jimmy Petterson.

Websites for ski resorts from this country included in Skiing Around the World:

Skiing Around The World Book

Skiing Around The World Book