It is also where you can glide down Huber’s Run before heading to Huber’s Hut restaurant to warm up with a mulled wine. And, if you are lucky, one of the old-timers will tell you about the "very special man" both are named after.
That man is Willi Huber, known as the founding father of Mt Hutt, who died at 97 last month. A husband, a father, a grandfather, a skiing legend — and, before August 9, one of the world’s last surviving members of a notorious Nazi unit, the Waffen-SS.
While the story was unknown to most before his death, Mr Huber’s links to a unit guilty of carrying out massive atrocities during World War 2, and his apparent unrepentant views on his war service, have understandably caused something of a stir.
Quotes of his from a television interview in 2017 — he said Hitler "offered a way out", referring to his own difficult upbringing in Austria, described the Nazi tyrant as being "very clever", and declared he had no knowledge of horrific crimes carried out by the Waffen-SS or of the Holocaust — have led to calls for Mt Hutt to take his name off the ski run and restaurant.
A petition has started, and the push to erase Mr Huber’s name has been embraced by heavyweights in the Jewish community.
"Nazi hunter" Efraim Zuroff, director of the Simon Wiesenthal Centre in Jerusalem, said anything honouring an "unrepentant Nazi" needed to be removed, and declared there was "no way" Mr Huber could not have been aware of SS atrocities.
Writing for The Spinoff, New Zealand Jewish Council spokeswoman Juliet Moses said "redemption only belongs to those who show remorse and rehabilitation, and Huber showed none of that."
Mr Huber was very young — just 17 — when he volunteered for the SS. His contribution to New Zealand skiing, Mt Hutt especially, since moving here in the 1950s has been hugely significant. He has a large family living in this country.
But those are not "mitigating factors", and they do not prevent us asking one salient question: Should anything in New Zealand be named in honour of a member of a group responsible for some of the worst atrocities in history?
The answer, surely, is that never, in any circumstances, is that appropriate. Nothing, anywhere, should carry the name of a cog in the Nazis’ genocidal machine.
Mt Hutt representatives should have acted sooner. But it is not too late. They can still recognise the contribution made by Mr Huber to the ski area and not carry open, public reminders of a Nazi link.
There was a similar case in Akaroa earlier this year when the Bully Hayes restaurant was called out for honouring an American whose deeds in the Pacific included human trafficking, and abducting and raping young women and children.
We can’t change history. We can’t erase it. But we can recognise when it is very obviously not right to just ignore it.
