Perisher Blue – Yabby Flats – Mid station Forester quad express (webcam shot: 29.04.09 @ 0° Celsius)Due to severe weather in SA, Victoria and NSW half a meter of snow has already fallen on Falls Creek’s slopes and it’s still only April down under. With resort openings still 5 weeks away this is quite a historic happening in Australia and phones won’t stop ringing with people asking for passes to go snowboarding. The same story for Perisher where it’s already possible to get some cheeky powder runs in if you are willing to hike a bit (if your car makes it up there). Overnight temperatures dropped to -5 degrees Celsius. Mt Hotham has had a similar snowfall.(addendum: just heard on the news that the European April has been the hottest April in 50 years as well as a very hot fall in Perth, Western Australia, with basically no rain at all – welcome climate change! New headline: TTR Tour soon to expand to Africa…)

“With this substantial snowfall, people are reminded that winter is only six weeks away so those who haven’t booked are now on the phone”, says Michael Callahan, General Manager, Falls Creek Ski Lifts. He is also attributing this to the current economic situation as people rather stay in Oz this season instead of booking an expensive trip to go ride overseas.The resort has also been host to the infamous “Oakley Stylewars” and event organizer Richard Hegarty has already handed in his application for this season. Stylewars is scheduled to go down between the 24th and the 28th of August 2009.Unfortunate for the Southern Hemisphere leg of the Swatch TTR World Tour and the industry downunder is the cancellation of the Burton Australian Open Snowboarding Championships, which were hosted by Perisher Blue.Links:http://www.fallscreek.com.auhttp://www.perisher.com.au/winter/index.phphttp://www.stylewars.com.au/Perisher Blue – bottom of the resortNew Zealand didn’t get that lucky yet, but there is no doubt snow will cover the giant snowpark in Wanaka soon enough. It’s the home to the 5Star Burton NZ Open, which will start off the Southern Hemisphere leg of the World Snowboard Tour on the 11th of August 2009. With a busy Olympic season coming up in 2010, this is a chance for the athletes to claim 5Star points early putting them ahead of the pack, just like Chas Guldemond did it last year coming 3rd in the slopestyle and he stayed in first half of the season.As you can read on NZsnowboard.com the NZ season will hopefully be a banger as well for the resorts and industry: Record online bookings, spectacular trans-Tasman airline tickets, a weak New Zealand dollar and significant marketing spend in Australia could deliver Queenstown its best ever winter ski season. Read more… Links:http://www.nzsnowboard.comhttp://snowparknz.comhttp://opensnowboarding.com