Snow on the slopes keeps the feelgood factor going for what could be a record year
It may be the end of April, but the momentous 2017-18 Scottish ski season still refuses to die. At time of going to press most of the upper mountain at Glencoe was still skiable, in spite of the recent run of mild weather, while over at Cairngorm it was still possible to connect all the way to the middle station via the Traverse and the Gun Barrel (or, for the more adventurous, via a thin-in-places White Lady). Resorts in the Alps started shutting down weeks ago, but here in Scotland it looks likely that the lifts will keep on spinning into May.
True, Glenshee, Nevis and the Lecht are now closed for the season, but they all enjoyed plenty of days with good snow and (crucially, as far as visitor numbers are concerned) good overhead conditions, so it will be interesting to see how the official “skier day” statistics for 2017/18 compare to those from the stellar winter of 2009-10, when they are released later this year.
The Scottish resorts also welcomed a few celebrity guests this season. After winning bronze in the Big Air Snowboard competition at the Winter Olympics, Southampton’s Billy Morgan made the mistake of saying that Britain had done well in Pyeongchang despite being “a nation that has no snow.” Ski-scotland chair Andy Meldrum wasted no time in inviting him to come and sample some of the funny-looking white stuff that had mysteriously appeared all over Scotland’s mountains and Morgan more than made up for his geography fail, putting on incredible displays in the terrain parks at Glencoe and Nevis Range and happily chatting away to some of the kids who were watching slack-jawed from the sidelines.
One of Scotland’s own Winter Olympians, halfpipe skier Murray Buchan, also did his bit to promote local snow-sliding, making a lateseason
trip to the Cairngorm terrain park and posting a picture of himself mid-backflip on social media; and speaking of backflips, Aberdeenshire snowboarder Ben Kilner, who represented Great Britain in the Winter Olympics in 2010 and 2014, was spotted launching a beauty on the third hole of Banchory Golf Course in early March, when the Beast from the East was in full effect and it was possible to ski or board pretty much anywhere with a slope.
One of the great advantages of the snow-sliding life is that there are always opportunities to learn new things and discover new places. I’ve spent the best part of 20 years travelling around the world looking for snow, but for some reason it took me until this winter to finally get up to the Lecht, the most north-easterly of Scotland’s ski areas, and it was nothing short of a revelation.
I’m not sure why it took me so long to get there – perhaps because it’s a bit further from the Central Belt than the other resorts, perhaps because in the back of my mind I didn’t think Scotland’s smallest ski centre would be worth the extra miles. But small really can be beautiful, and for a couple of days during February half-term the Lecht was not far off paradise.
Skiing with young kids (ours are seven and four) makes you think about a whole range of factors that you wouldn’t even consider if you were skiing with adults: how far is it from the car park to the beginner slopes, in case you forget somebody’s gloves/goggles/helmet and have to go back for them? How easy or difficult are the button tows and T-bars? What are the queues like? (Because, y’know, attention spans.) And how sheltered are the slopes from the wind?
The Lecht scores highly on all of the above, but the last factor was the main reason we ended up going: it was forecast to blow a hoolie on the top of Cairngorm, but the friends we were staying with thought the Lecht wouldn’t be as bad. As it turned out they were dead right, and while we later learned that the lifts at Cairngorm had to be put on hold because of the wind, the Lecht, hunkered down in its own NW-SE oriented valley, was merely caressed with what a sailor might have described as “light airs”.
So yes, the Lecht is ideal for children, but for grown-ups? Well, in the afternoon of our first day there, with the kids all skied-out, I was given permission to get out the splitboard and have a quick look around the as-yet unopened Buzzard side of the mountain. I was about half-way up when a piste-basher roared past, filling the air with a cloud of sparkling ice crystals, and by the time I got to the top there was a blank canvas of perfect corduroy just waiting to be scribbled on. True, it wasn’t the longest run in the world, but once the lifts started running the queues were light, so it was possible to pack in plenty of vertical. Seek, as they say, and ye shall probably find.
It took me until this winter to finally get up to the Lecht, and it was nothing short of a revelation