The Farm Road to the Sky

In New Zealand, we take it for granted that if we want to go skiing or snowboarding, most of us will end up driving one of the country’s notorious ski field roads to get to the snow. It’s a part of our daily ritual – the queue of cars at the bottom of the road all putting chains on in the morning, is a good sign you’re going to have a powder-eating day on the slopes.

It’s not often that we consider the story behind the road, and how & why it was built. We don’t think about the herculean efforts that go into building kilometre after kilometre of road in some of the world’s harshest environments… with precarious drops either side. As we drive up the Cardrona road, we see signs that name each corner & section of the road, but the tales behind how they got those names are not well known.

So, we sat down with Cardrona’s founders, John & Mary Lee, to get the inside scoop on those names, & what happened 40 years ago. What made them think building a “high-quality farm road” up to a non-existent ski area was a good idea? Spoiler alert: not many other people thought it was…

Cardrona wasn’t a ski area built by skiers; in fact, John Lee wasn’t a skier at all. “When I met John, I thought that was the end of skiing for me because he didn’t like it,” says Mary. Despite this, John hatched the idea to build a ski area when the Cardrona Valley lost its school bus when there were no longer enough children to sustain it. Lack of community resources was a major concern for the family.

“Every farm had to pay 100 pounds & every family had to pay 50 pounds to keep the school bus going, & that wasn’t sustainable. So tourism was the answer to bring people to Cardrona. To get the school bus going, I decided to buy Mt Cardrona & build a ski field there,” says John.

"The other option was to make more children,” Mary jokes.

The other reason to buy Mt Cardrona was to get a doctor to move to Wanaka. At the time, you’d be lucky to receive the medical attention you needed in time – it was a real issue for the community. John was introduced to Auckland Doctor, Dennis Pezaro, through mutual friend Pat Frengley. Dr Pezaro told John he would move to the small town if he could secure a piece of land near Wanaka. A 60ha spot of land up the Cardrona Valley was owned by Don Mackenzie, who also owned Mt Cardrona. John & Dennis secured that land while negotiating the Mt Cardrona purchase, & Dennis ended up practicing medicine in Wanaka for 40 years.

Now proud owner of Mt Cardrona, John began to make his ski field dream a reality. A farmer could, as his right, put a road in on his own land back then. So John put the road in, & once it was done, he made an application to the council for resource consent for a ski field. They couldn’t look at the road as part of the application, because it was already there!

The road took almost five years to build. “I kept running out of money!” says John. At the time, many people told the Lees that they were fools to put another ski area in the same region. That attitude, along with John’s money woes, nearly halted the project.

In the ‘70s an international engineer from Doppelmayr Austria visited Mt Cardrona. As he & John walked the ski field, the engineer told John that once in every three years around the world, he saw a piece of terrain that caught his eye. Cardrona was one of them. That gave John the confidence to keep going.

John had a strong vision for the road. He knew that if he was to get tourists to Cardrona, they needed to come up in buses, so he designed the road with buses in mind. The result was a [comparatively] wide road with a very mellow incline.

HE KNEW THAT IF HE WAS TO GET TOURISTS TO CARDRONA, THEY NEEDED TO COME UP IN BUSES, SO HE DESIGNED THE ROAD WITH BUSES IN MIND.

Almost 40 years later the “farm road” is still going strong. Vehicles of all types head up the road John & his friends built together all those years ago, to send their occupants skiing, snowboarding, mountain biking, sightseeing & more. John & Mary’s quest to build something that would help their community is a spirit you see right through the resort today – a spirit of working together, whilst challenging conventional thinking.