Absolute Alps Holidays Ski Blog

The season is in full swing again, we had a very white Christmas. It snowed all day on Christmas Eve and into Christmas Day. Today on Boxing Day we have been treated to beautiful blue sky and sunshine, even if it was a little chilly. In fact its the first time in a few weeks that it’s been colder here than it has been in the UK.
The pistes are all looking and feeling superb, here we go again

The last couple of days have been very wintery in the Alps, this morning there was a good few inches of snow in Chatel. I think the snow line was down below 1000m, so I’d expect the tops of the mountains to have a fair amount of snow on them now.

Most people in Northern Europe are currently experiencing an icy blast of cold air flowing south from the Arctic, we had snow down to about 100m above the village at the weekend and tomorrow our first blanket of winter snow is due to fall over all the village.
So time for my yearly winter French Alps snow prediction, as the weather has cooled over the last month the annual invasion of big black spiders has taken place. This year we had a record count of 4 big ones caught in the bath at one time, which I’m fairly confident signifies a very snowy winter.
But if you want more scientific approach I’ve found these couple of related BBC News articles Low solar activity link to cold UK winters & Solar surprise for climate issue.
Both suggesting the currently observed extended Solar minimum could have been responsible for the last couple of cold winter we’ve experienced and suggesting this trend could continue for another few years.
So I’m predicting that winter will be cold & snowy with lots of great skiing to be had.

This last weekend brought a little reminder that winter is coming. We had a dusting of snow on the tops of the mountains and the drop in temperature produced a syncronised colour change in the trees, which are all looking very Autumnal now.
Another summer has definately slipped by, we had a hot & dry July followed by a more mixed August & September.

This season seems to ticking along very nicely, we had one of our biggest dumps of snow a couple of days ago and it brought back memories of last season with waist deep powder every week. Although we havn’t been having mega dumps all the time we have been getting constant smaller snowfalls all through December & January, the skiing this January has been superb with the pistes in tip-top condition and plenty of blue skies mixed in too.
Roll on February and bring on the kids !