Winter on hold for French ski resorts

France is the most popular skiing destination after the USA, but ski resorts in France have had to delay their openings this week because of an unprecedented shortage of early snow. Indeed, France has seen its second warmest November in a century with temperatures 2.5C above normal. Météo France reported that the autumn was exceptionally warm and extremely dry. What’s particularly unusual is that there’s no snow in the 2200m to 2800m zone.

This time last year conditions were great early on and you could ski pretty much everywhere, but there wasn’t much snow into the new year.

In the French Alps, nine out of the twelve ski resorts that were to have opened their pistes this weekend have been forced to postpone. Amongst them, Alpe d’Huez, les Grands-Montets in Chamonix, Méribel and Megève.

And, 3 out of 4 races in the world Alpine ski championships due to be held in the usually snow-sure Val d’Isère resort have been forced to move to Beaver Creek, Colorado.

Bargain ski passes available for mountain lovers

It wasn’t all bad, a number of ski resorts have managed to open this weekend, including Les Deux Alpes where twelve higher altitude pistes are open for skiing. Isola 2000 in the southern French Alps went ahead as planned with its resort opening, but offered heavily discounted ski passes as only 11 of its 42 pistes were open. Courcheval was offering free use of an artificial run and Val Thorens, Europe’s highest resort is operating eight of 78 pistes.

The outlook for the run up to Christmas is more promising with snow expected in the Alps this week. And provided it stays cold, snow canons will be able to lay a good base across many more pistes.

If the snow comes it will be just in the nick of time with the first wave of festive skiers hitting the ski resorts in just two weeks time.