Feeling anxious

You really have to feel for anyone in that situation.

Not much consolation but I see Les Gets website says that it is refunding all pre-purchased passes for this week. They also say there's a 'crowd' control limit put in place for Avoriaz capping the number of day passes being sold - I guess you can understand.

The temps are due to drop so the snow cannons will be fired up.

There's currently 38 runs open in avoriaz, once you are up the mountain it will be better. Yes there will be queues but I have a feeling they will release more lift passes.

At home in dreary England or on holiday in crisp mountain air. No brainer for me

I am off to les gets on 31 jan. Like to think it will be better, if it isn't I will find a pub.

Iceman, as mentioned previously I've lived in the Alps for quite a long time, this is my 25th season. The 1989/90 season also had a really bad start, it didn't snow until about the middle of January.

In the early years I used to help out with snowmaking at one of the small local areas, back then it was a pretty labour intensive business, manhandling snow cannons and fire hoses at temperatures of –10°C and below is extremely hard work. These days most of them are plumbed in and controlled from a nice warm control room. So I know from firsthand experience how much snow a snow canon can make at a certain temperature.

I found the information about snowmaking in Tyrol in an article on the website belonging to the Austrian equivalent to the BBC http://orf.at/ I thought "Wow that's a lot of snow" or something roughly equivalent!

Austria has invested an enormous amount of money in snowmaking, about 60% of the pistes there are covered in artificial snow. In order to do that they have made some pretty big alterations to the landscape, I don't think you could get away with building something like this elsewhere.



Unfortunately I don't think they have much choice, winter tourism, ski equipment manufacturing, building ski lifts, piste machines and snowmaking equipment account for about 5% of Austrian GDP. The UK retail sector also accounts for about 5% of GDP, so it's tremendously important to the economy.

The future is going to be challenging http://www.academia.edu/3213455/Snowmaking_and_climate_change_Future_options_for_snow_production_in_Tyrolean_ski_resorts This year has been the warmest since records began 247 years ago, November and December were over 3 degrees warmer than the average temperature from 1981-2010.

That's all very interesting. It read like a copy and paste.

Not sure of the reason for your justification. Just saying

What's your opinion on my theory?

I read somewhere that in 80 years there probably won't be possible to ski anywhere in the Alps due to climate change. So we should consider ourselves lucky. Future generations won't have it that good.

I remember 20 years ago someone saying "in 20 years time it won't be possible to ski in the Alps due to global warming....".
Clearly they were wrong... or were they! :twisted:

I do hope the 50cm forecast for ADH this weekend turns up. It's looking scarily bare today! Arriving on the 3rd.



Different story in Japan, after a delayed start, Niseko are on track for a record December. 3m 19cm of snow so far! Getting much more excited about going there by the minute!

Fingers crossed and it won't look like that come Saturday afternoon...