Mega Guangzhou indoor snow park reopens in China. And us?
China and the World’s 2nd largest indoor snow park, Guangzhou Sunac Snow Park, reopened on May 10. Happy local shredders were out in force to celebrate.
Not so many as it normally allows – the daily capacity is 4500 visitors, with 1500 at a time.
“Now we have 500 visitors to 700 visitors daily, as it has just reopened for a week” Associate Operations Manager Zhang Xinli told Snow Action.
No problems have been reported at the popular facility since then.
The mega snow park originally opened in June 2019. The indoor park features 75,000 sqm construction area and a 55,700 sqm “cold area”.
The slope offers 66m vertical, served by a single double chair. Five runs from beginner to advanced level vary from 80m to 243m long. Not too shabby for indoors!
You can fuel up on KFC between laps.
Taking 55,700sqm cold area divided by 500 gives a ratio of 0.1114 hectares per skier/boarder. In China. The original epicentre of COVID-19.
They are happy doing that, and appear to be doing so safely.
So how does that compare to the 2 skiers/boarders per hectare proposed in New Zealand?
It’s 4,488 times more dense that’s how. And it’s indoors! Factor in 700 riders at a time and you have over 6,000 times more than the NZ proposal.
We don’t have any published proposed limits for Australian ski resorts yet, only those gatherings numbers. Which say it goes up to 500 people at Perisher would mean 2.49ha per person ..
Which begs the question, seriously folks, are we over-reacting here? Do we really need to send businesses to the wall, many of which already took a huge hit from the fires.
There is a lot of evidence that says yes, skiing per se is not any problem at all – the Guangzhou Sunac Snow Park reopening being more of that.
We already mentioned a couple of weeks back the success of Japanese resorts staying open with little or zero discernible effects on COVID-19 infection rates there (which remain very low).
