Where is all the snow?

The Aussie season had nothing for the first two weeks(nothing unusual) then we had two decent dumps and probably the best season in 10 years. i don't get to st Anton until the 27th Dec so i wont panic just yet.

Getting really concerned now. Saalbach and soll both open next weekend and unless the snow god has turned snow from white to green it aint gonna happen. Temps in both towns still reaching 19c during the day. Even at altitude its not getting below freezing so any snow that does fall is landing on warm ground. It needs to get cold very fast and snow heavily for days if they are to open, but forecasts I have seen do not show much change. Mankini is getting dug out just in case.

I am looking at the webcams trying to figure out where around Geneva to go around the 8th December. At the moment 3V, espace Killy and Les Arcs et al look diabolical. No real snow forecast for next week either.

Best bet so far is Cervinia. Mostly open and more snow forecast this week. About two and a bit hours drive from Geneva.
We land in Geneva on the 11th December and the plan is to go to Sestriere but I won't make a decision until this time next week.

Yep Gareth, at this stage it will be Cervinia or Sestriere. Snow forecast for later in week and Plan Maison cam showed decent cover albeit in ordinary weather. Will let you know what we find

Juddernaut wrote:Yep Gareth, at this stage it will be Cervinia or Sestriere. Snow forecast for later in week and Plan Maison cam showed decent cover albeit in ordinary weather. Will let you know what we find

That would be great, I need to make a decision by this time next week so a report from the resort would be much appreciated.

Well I've got 12 days to departure to Gastein which has zero snow, none forecast this week and only a couple of nights forecast to be cold enough to make any so its looking like a disaster. Would not fancy being a Crystal rep in Austria before Xmas.
Has someone had previous experience of this, if so what will Crystal do? Could Crystal move us to another resort (if any of them have snow)? Would the lift company bus everyone to the nearest glacier which is Kaprun as far as I can see but that would take 3 hour.s round trip a day so not good and it would be packed anyway

I've looked at 14 years of snow records for Bad Gastein and they always had SOME snow by 3rd week of December. Now, this might be only a couple of runs open high up, I don't know, because I'm only looking at the snow depth history, but I'm sure the resort would have been open. I expect this year they will manage to get one run open high up by the opening date.
Ski-ing early, or late, in the season is always taking the risk that the runs will be patchy, or some of them will be closed. I suppose that's why the holidays are much cheaper at this time of year than mid season when it's much more likely that there will be a decent amount of snow.
The bad years were 2007/2008 when it looks as though they had no snow on the lower slopes for the whole season, but that was a bad year in a lot of resorts, as I remember.
And in 2002/2003 and 2000/2001 there was no snow until the 3rd week of December.
Here's the chart for 2002/2003 taken from the Ski Club of Great Britain website.



I also had a look at the weather forecast, and on Sunday 7th December the freezing level is predicted to drop to 900m with temperatures overnight of minus 4. They're bound to be able to make snow at those temperatures, I would have thought!