10,000 BC|Waiorau Snow Farm — A Third of the Ice Age Built on a Plateau

About a third of 10,000 BC's snowbound footage came off a single high plateau above Cardrona Valley, and the crew spent five weeks building sets there before a camera ever rolled. Waiorau Snow Farm sits around 1,520 meters up in the Pisa Range, reached by the same road that first carried the film's trucks past the whitewashed, 1863-built Cardrona Hotel — still serving beer at the same address to everyone who drives the valley today. Mary and John Lee opened this plateau in 1986 as New Zealand's first cross-country ski area, naming it for the Māori Waiorau, "the place of a hundred waters," before the working farm's own name took over the signage for good. There's no chairlift queue and no resort village here, just an open sweep of snow-grass and ridgeline wide enough to lose an entire ice-age set inside and still have room to pull the camera back further. Drive up at dusk and the hotel's lit windows are the last sign of anyone else for the rest of the climb.