Who says skiing or boarding Thredbo has to be expensive – you can do it for $12 a day which makes a Thredbo season pass pretty cheap and awesome value.
OK, that’s a slight exaggeration. It actually cost Snow Action’s Snowboard Editor & gear test guru Peter Wunder a fraction less than $12.03 daily for his 113 days on the hill at Thredbo last 2022 winter. Check his feature in the latest issue of Snow Action in print or read on here.
Opening day June 11 looked like this already, which was a bonus – and way better than what we are looking at for 2023, but them’s the breaks. Powder, blizzard, bluebird, rain, hail or play-misty-for-me, he was out there. Never later than 5th lift in the morning either.
Not too shabby at all!
$12.03 for a day pass skiing Thredbo. Sounds like a bargain right!
Well it is, but you need to put in the days to get that price per day. I skied or boarded every possible lifted access day in the 2022 winter season, which was 113 days. On a discount local resident season pass of $1,359 this worked out at $12.03.
You may think “well you probably just did a few runs a day”, but that’s not the case at all. I did 2,252 runs in total. That’s an average of 19.9 runs a day, or $0.60 per run.*
Or roughly 1,000,000 vertical meters for the season.
It’s not an easy feat when you have rainy and windy days when you can only get a handful of runs in due to the lifts going on wind hold or running slowly due to bad weather.
You need to plan well in advance to clear your schedule for four months to be on the hill every day, but it’s well worth it. If I wasn’t on the very first chair of the day I was on one of the first five chairs, total commitment right to the end.
It’s not always easy to get out there in the pouring rain when you’ve already been skiing every day for months, but besides getting a little wet, rain days have super fun slushy snow which is so much fun on a board.
Not many people brave the bad weather so the groomers stay neat and flat and you often have the hill to yourself to enjoy.
It helps to have great water proof gear like the North Face Summit Series Chamlang FUTURELIGHT jacket. It’s well worth making the most of the soft conditions because when it stops raining and freezes, the next day is often solid bullet proof ice.
Getting out on the hill so much gives you the advantage of seeing and experiencing the weather every day, so you know what conditions will be like and obviously you get all the powder days so maximum fun.
Without trying, the time on the hill will improve your skiing/riding, and you won’t need to go to the gym. You might have leg burn for the first few days, but the rest of the season you can enjoy watching friends suffer on their first trip down feeling the burn because they didn’t work on their fitness before their snow trip.
Sure, life’s busy and it’s hard to get away, especially for a big chunk of time, but it’s so worth it. Even if you just experience one full winter in your life and all the stories and memories made doing that you will never regret it. And for a time maybe you can even call yourself a local..
For Thredbo passes check the website here.
Even if you can’t quite match Pete’s amazing every day plus first 5 lifts effort you can still get in a huge amount of riding/skiing if you can do a season. If not, make the most of what you can get – every day youy ride reduces that per day tally,
*Editor’s Note: If Pete had stayed in-bounds he might have racked up 2 or 3 million metres vert off the lifts and made it 20 or 30c a run .. but he loves a fresh line and usually heads out to find it after sessioning the lifts – check out his great feature on where you can too here:
