Mt Buller and the Blizzard of Oz
Is there a better feeling than checking the snow forecasts as you head off to a ski fields and seeing they are predicting a metre of snow? Once #BlizzardofOz started trending we knew we were in for a good few days.
As we all know, getting to the snow from Queensland is quite a trip, however Mt Buller would have to be one of the easiest resorts to get to. With a 2-hour flight from Brisbane (or even Toowoomba), and a 3 hour 15-minute drive from Melbourne Airport to Mt Buller you can be in the resort and ready for Twilight Skiing on the same day you leave (assuming you planned ahead and travelled on Saturday or Sunday, which are the Twilight skiing days this season).
Having said that, it is still a bit of process to get door to door – we hired a car in Melbourne, stopped in Mansfield to hire snow chains and buy some food for the week, then once you get up the mountain you park in one of the overnight car parks and get a snow taxi up to the resort.
We stayed at the Arlberg, right on the ski runs, so once we were in our room the only transport we needed was a chairlift! The Arlberg is one of the best-known properties on Mt Buller, and is a great place to stay. We booked one of their standard family rooms, with a double and bunks and basic kitchen facilities. The room was fairly simple but had everything we needed to sleep comfortably, and prepare our food. It was, however, distinctly lacking in storage with just a wardrobe and no drawers which made for quite the explosion of ski gear with 4 of us in one room.
We were very happy with our room, but they do offer a range of apartments from 1–3 bedrooms through to basic motel style rooms so there are options for everyone.
The onsite restaurant offers a good range of meals, including a kid’s menu, and with the fire roaring and the snow falling outside it was a great place to have dinner. Of course, as with all on-mountain food it wasn’t cheap but most of the meals felt like decent value.
The staff at the Arlberg were all very friendly and cheerful, from the reception staff to the wait staff and also the guys in the ski hire shop.
Hiring our boots and boards from the Arlberg meant we could get our gear on the evening we arrived ready to ski when the lifts opened in the morning. When I needed, a binding tightened I just dropped in as I boarded past and barely missed a moment on the snow.
It is located at the top of the Blue Bullet chairlift, so we could finish the day with a run down to the village and get the chairlift back up to get to the room. The only hassle with that is that it was too far for the kids to walk up from the village, so once the chairlift stopped running and free village shuttle had finished (at 6pm) a taxi was the only way back to the room.
Mt Buller itself is a very well signposted ski field – given it was an almost total whiteout on the first day we would have been utterly lost without the run markers. Once the skies cleared and we could see how the runs connected we found lots of runs we could all enjoy. There are very few green beginner runs, but plenty of easy blues that anyone who has had a few days on the snow would be able to manage. I will say that the beginner run into the village was one of the busiest runs I’ve seen in a long time, no major queues on the lifts but bodies everywhere on the slopes. As my husband said to me, if the kids can learn to ski through that they will be fine on any other runs we show them. So, we did take them right up to the Summit, and down their first black run which they handled like pros. Nothing seems to faze kids, possibly because they are only a metre off the ground and they bounce!
The ski school in Mt Buller got a thumbs up from our kids, and they certainly seemed to progress through the week. As an adult, I question the logic of having the main entrance to ski school down 3 flights of stairs – not fun with kids in ski boots – but once we worked out we could ski half way down the run and sneak in the back door it didn’t worry us too much. They did a good job of checking kids in and out (so good that it caused quite a queue at pick up sometimes), and I also appreciated that each instructor came and gave every parent feedback on their child’s day.
As a family holiday, this trip worked brilliantly for us. My husband and I got to enjoy some time with just the two of us, but because we were staying on the snow we had time to do a couple of runs before and after ski school with the kids as well. Our girls are 6 and 8 and this was their 3rd ski trip, so they are now quite proficient little skiers, which meant we could take them all over the mountain and actually enjoy skiing all together.
And of course, that metre of fresh snow was the icing on the cake!