Methven’s small size an asset in ski season

Press, 1 June 1989, Page 37

Methven’s small size an asset in ski season

Methven is a small rural town without any great pretensions despite its relatively high profile during the ski season.

And this is an asset rather than a liability, according to the marketing officer for the Methven and Mount Hutt District Promotion Association, Astrid AndersenPoff.

“You don’t have to be a Queenstown,” she says. “You have to promote yourself for what you are.”

But what is being pushed is the concept of Methven (23km away from the ski-field) being the Mount Hutt village. As “a quiet crossroads in the middle of the Canterbury Plains” Methven certainly seemed to appeal to the editor of the American “Ski” magazine, Dick Needham. He writes of it “consisting of 17 lodges, one golf course (used daily, which is the beauty of winter-in-the-mountains, summer-in-the-valley ski-ing in New Zealand), two motels, 14 restaurants, four takeaways, three churches, two ski shops, one trotting club, and the Blue Pub which boasts the highest-per-capita consumption of Steinlager Green.

The figures are reasonably accurate, the image just about dead right.

Since the snow arrived last week things have been starting to hum in Methven with the Mount Hutt Restaurant opening its doors and the two ski shops, Wombat’s and Big Al’s, flat out crystal gliding skis.

Whether or not the white stuff is around in abundance the town spirit gets an annual boost these

days with the Winter Festival in me nrst week ot July.

The festival, running this year from July 1 to 8, features a hacky sack competition. For we uninitiated folk a hacky sack is apparently something like a miniature beanbag and the idea is to keep it off the ground using any part of the body below the waist, the side of the foot for example. And you have to hit it hard to get it up in the air. Other regular parts of the Winter Festival are the dog bark-off, the beerfest and the waiters’ race. Astrid Andersen-Poff says that opening day, a Saturday, will be a sort of a country fair atmosphere with a hanging thrown in ("we were discussing a lynching”) and someone in the stocks. The Wizard and Alf’s Imperial Army will be around and Morris dancers will entertain.

The battle starring Alf’s Imperial Army will be held on “Banana Beach,” the grass verge between the two pubs, the blue one and the brown one. Banana Beach is where the beach parties are held in the spring. “It’s good for local morale,” says Astrid Andersen-Poff.

Something fairly new that should go down well with visitors is Farm Haven, a rather unusual place run by Angus and Joan McKay. For just $2 people get to see a huge shed-cum museum crammed full with all sorts of machinery and old cars and to see the farm animals, ranging from bunnies to sheep. The place is next to Centrepoint on the Ashburton Rakaia Gorge Road.