GLAD YOU’RE NOT HERE!
No snow. Resorts in despair. It’s been the worst start to a ski season in decades, discovers Robert Hardman
THE apres-ski cocktails start early here in the fashionable French resort of Megeve. In fact, with no skiing whatsoever — and, believe me, I have tried — it’s never too soon to order a gluwein. It’s the same up the road in Morzine. There, the authorities have just reopened the adventure playground for children. This is actually a summer attraction. But with the Christmas holiday crowds arriving today, the council is frantically dreaming up new ways to entertain thousands of skiers in a ski resort which is still lacking one vital component: snow.
Over in Chamonix, the famous mountain town at the foot of Mont Blanc, a handful of ski lifts will finally rumble into life from this morning.
It will mean there is a limited amount of skiing on some higher slopes for the first time this winter, but everyone acknowledges that it is not enough to cater for the thousands of skiers on their way.
Wherever I have been in the Alps this week, the locals tell me that it has been one of the most atrocious starts to a ski season anyone can recall. Many resorts — including some very famous ones — have had to delay opening by a week or two.
Others remain closed to all skiers. And even in the higher ski areas (above 2,200 metres) which are blessed with a rudimentary layer of the white stuff and, in some cases, a glacier, staff are stilll worried. They know they can expect t overcrowded slopes and long liftt queues as snow-starved punters aree bussed in from all those forlorn brownn towns further down the valleys.
Nor is there much chance of fleeing g the crowds, leaving the beaten track k and skiing off-piste. In these condi- tions, that could prove suicidal.
If ‘the big dump’ does not come soon,, the high resorts acknowledge they may y have to limit numbers on their slopess — or lock out the poor relations.
This should have been a bumperr season for British skiers, too, with thee pound considerably stronger than n last year and a new winter Eurostarr rail connection to Geneva four times s a week. Instead, they are glued to the e snow reports on the Ski Club Of Great Britain’s website as they face the prospect of snow rations.
Ask anyone in these nervous communities what they want, and they all have the same message: leave the presents behind, Santa, and just bring a Lapland-sized sack of snow, please. Even if there is a blizzard tonight, the damage has already been done to bookings for next December. Memories are short and people will base their plans for 2015 on what happened in 2014, not all those bumper years which preceded it.
‘Bookings are up by 10 per cent on last year but we have had the worst start in 40 years,’ sighs Julie Merie at the tourist office in Les Arcs.
Over in the Austrian resort of Lech, much favoured by European royalty, just 13 out of 47 lifts are open. Spokeswoman Pia Herbst describes this as the worst start to a season since 1999. ‘But then, when the snow finally came, it didn’t stop and we were snowed in for two weeks!’ she adds.
So how bad is it really? Old hands can recall pretty miserable Decembers back in the Eighties and Nineties. But the main difference between then and now is that, today, most resorts also have expensive snowmaking cannons to take up the slack.
Yet these are no use unless the temperature is below freezing, and the Alps have experienced a prolonged period of unseasonal warm weather.
Other parts of Europe are fine. The snow is looking good in the Pyrenees, for example. But it is the French Alps which are feeling particularly neglected by the snow gods. Although there have been fresh falls during my stay this week, they have not been followed by a decent cold spell. Below 2,000 metres, most of this week’s snow was followed by rain, which soon turned it to slush.
My Alpine odyssey begins in the town
of Les Gets, a family-friendly French town not far from the Swiss border. It’s a relatively lowlying ski resort and would never expect a rich carpet of snow at this time of year. But when I pass through, I find rolling green fields with the occasional splurge of white where a snow cannon has done its best. It looks a bit like the Yorkshire Dales.
A spokeswoman for the resort says that ‘fingers are crossed’ for snow and that, in the meantime, families can look forward to an exciting series of Father Christmas-themed events.
Rain is falling by the time I get to Morzine, another relatively low ski town. The tourist office could not be more welcoming. Nadine Chevalier tells me that the town is doing everything it can, i ncluding l aying on extra buses to get people up to the higher neighbouring resort of Avoriaz.
‘We just don’t want to think of Christmas without snow,’ she says. But, f or now, all of Morzine’s pistes are closed.
Up by the Pleney cable car station, however, I notice a small patch of snow, about the size of a tennis court.
Seized by a spirit of solidarity — and so that I can claim to be Morzine’s first skier of the season — I walk to the top, stick on some skis and ‘bend ze knees’. I must be hitting at least five miles an hour as I grind to a halt in the mud a few seconds later.
Morzine is at the heart of one of the world’s largest ski areas, a chunk of Alp known as Les Portes du Soleil. Today, the only skiing in its entire 250-mile piste network is to be found half an hour away in Avoriaz. Visibility is poor, the snow is slushy at the bottom — but it is better than nothing. And the local lift company says it will have up to 40 per cent of Avoriaz open this weekend.
Onwards to Megeve, the ultra-chi-chi resort built by the Rothschild family in the Twenties.
The management had originally intended to start running lifts from December 6. Then they pushed the date back to December 13 — but still no snow. The first cable cars will finally start running today, but only for hillwalkers. For now, Megeve remains off-limits to skiers.
FROM a distance, though, it does look as if there is a thin layer of white on the slopes. Surely, it’s worth a try? I put on skis and trudge up the hill next to the Rochebrune cable car station. Grass is poking through the porridge veneer. In some places, the slush has given way to large puddles. I point my skis straight down the hill, squelch forward for a few yards and then stop in my tracks.
As night falls, we reach the f amous Olympic resort of Meribel, founded in the Thirties by a British Army officer. Set high in the vast Trois Vallees ski area, it is so popular with the British that we account for 40 per cent of its 1.6 million overnight stays each season.
Snow is falling gently and the outlook appears promising.
The following day, I sit down with the Meribel management. Resort director Jean- Louis Leger-Mattei points out that snow depths have always gone in cycles. ‘Ten years ago we would get ten metres of snow during a season. In the last year or two, it has been five metres over the whole season.’
Olivier Simonin, managing director of the Meribel Alpina ski lift company, stresses that this was one of the first resorts in the world to install a snow gun in 1985. ‘People said we were crazy,’ he says. But now Meribel has 700 guns covering half of its entire piste network.
Although they cost £25 million, they are certainly paying dividends this winter: this morning, the resort expects to have 70 per cent of its runs open.
An hour away, I come to Les Arcs, a high-rise resort built in the Seventies. Because of its altitude it has fine, if limited, skiing on the higher pistes.
British voices are everywhere today. It turns out that more t han a t housand British students are in town.
‘It’s been quite repetitive skiing the same runs all the time,’ says Peter Roberts, 22, from Southampton University. ‘It’s nothing like previous years, but it’s still good fun.’
Spirits — British ones, at least — remain high. ‘It’s not ideal, but at least we have skied every day,’ says Eric, 53, a British engineer based in Holland. ‘There’s no point coming all the way here and being miserable,’ adds his wife, Joanna, with a big smile.
I ndeed not. But f or the thousands of Brits heading to the Alps this weekend, there is one possibility even worse than a brown Christmas. And that is sitting in the rain out there and reading about a white one back in Blighty.