Snow business

From the mildest May on record we’ve plunged into winter depths rarely seen in the Wairarapa – or the Wellington CBD, for that matter!



The weekend which has just passed was very much dominated by the weather. A turn to the southeast spared us the dreaded westerly gales, instead bringing waves of freezing rain and icy blasts. The unbroken grey sky, and ground so saturated in places that it feels like a thin membrane stretched across a lake of liquid mud, made me wonder if this might be as bad as it gets. I don’t mean that in a depressed sense, because we remain cheerful, excited about the speedily progressing build, and dry and warm when we need to be. Winter will have to try harder than this to get us down, we resolved.

And how prophetic those words would soon prove to be…

A Sunday lunch at the Lake Ferry Pub is an ever-dependable ‘winter blues buster’. Enjoying fish and chips and a pint while perched close to the wood burner, with a good book and a view of the grey wintery sea is always a tonic for this time of year, and today was no exception.

Returning home, we noticed that the rain had stopped and the air seemed stiller somehow. Perhaps the southerly we’d been promised wasn’t going to materialise after all.

Around four thirty the following morning, we were answering the call of nature when I noticed that not only was the doormat colder than usual under my bare feet, but oddly crunchy. The torch beam soon revealed winter’s best efforts – snow everywhere with flakes still falling.

Ed examines strange footprints in the snow, can it be the fabled
Wild Man of the Tararuas?

The good thing about winter trying harder is that snow has the effect of making adults behave like excited children – the potentially morale-sapping weather had provided its own antidote! The following photographs show the extent of that days snowfall, which will probably go down in history as day it snowed in the Wellington CBD, with the city reaching it’s coldest temperature since records began.

Dawn brings our first glimpse of the snow covered foothills – and cars.

Snow continues to fall throughout the day, stranding our builder
on the wrong side of the Rimutaka hill.

The following day dawns bright and clear, revealing the
Tararua foothills in their winter coat