skiing the south

I've been on several ski areas in Colorado and Montana. Now I've been on three different areas here in New Zealand (hopefully four today) and there are some marked differences down here.
No. 1, the biggest difference: there are no trees. No trees anywhere on the mountain. As far as I can tell, this is a universal rule here.
Everywhere I've been in the States, trees serve as the dividing lines on the ski area. Trees are cleared to make runs, so if you want to know where a run goes, the trees tell you. Sure, there are areas that open up, or open bowls to ski, but on the main mountain, most runs have a tree-lined border.
Not here. For whatever reason, the mountains where the ski fields are located don't have trees. So the ski areas are just one open face. The named runs blend into each other, or are simply the valleys or drainage creases. Sometimes a run is bordered by rocks, but more often it's just a matter of skiing where you can. The small ridges, valleys and cliffs on any mountain side are the only things keeping New Zealand ski areas from just being one wide-open run. And in some cases, that's exactly what you get.

No. 2: the view. Part of this has to do with the first difference, but there's more to it. In the Rockies, the mountains are bunched up. The ski areas might be at higher altitudes than in New Zealand, but the mountains here often rise straight up off a sea-level plain. At a lot of the resorts back home, the base of the lifts is essentially right at the highway. There's the resort, condos, hotels, a whole complex at the base. Even if there isn't, the base of the mountain is the same as the bottom of the ski area.
In New Zealand, the ski areas are generally perched right at the top of mountains that just keep going down. The skiable area or the part that gets snow, is only the top third or quarter of the mountainside. This, along with the lack of trees, means you get panoramic views of a valley floor that's a lot further down than the ski field. At the two areas I've skied the past couple weeks, when you came to a ridge or just before a steep drop, it appeared as though you were at the top of a cliff that fell all the way to the distant valley. It was a bit disorienting, a bit exhilarating, and far more of a view than I've ever gotten on a ski field back home. There also aren't any areas that have turned into resorts the way they are back home. There's not really any place to put the condos and restaurants up on the side of the mountain, and the access roads are mostly just gravel switchback tracks all the way up.

On the down side, the areas here aren't nearly as large and generally don't have near the quality of snow as areas back in the States. Also, they're not particularly cheap. But it is skiing, and there's a quality to New Zealand skiing that's all its own.