Well, thank goodness summer is over. Now we can stick the barbie back in the
shed where it belongs and start looking forward to winter.
The ski season is just around the corner, and I, like everyone else who’s
caught the downhill bug, can’t wait to get started. On Travel, we’re
unleashing an avalanche of ski articles over the coming weeks to celebrate.
Sebastian Faulks looks back on a lifetime of skiing holidays and reflects on
how much easier it all is these days. He also reminds us that you don’t need
to stay in a mega-resort with 30,000 guest beds to ensure access to
world-class pistes.
Last winter, he got the benefit of not one but four skiing areas while staying
in a luxurious chalet in a tiny French hamlet, far from the madding crowd.
Where?
Next week, we’re fitting a whalebone corset on our wallets and going budget
skiing. Last winter, I checked into Bansko in Bulgaria to see whether its
low-cost image lived up to the hype.
I’ll be comparing its prices, pound for pound, with both Andorra in the
Pyrenees and the purpose-built resorts of the French Alps — and all the
while trying not to remember the unfinished blocks of flats that so
disfigured the middle of town.
Then, on October 11, I’ll lift the lid on the six ages of skiing man (and
woman), from student hellraiser to silver-haired sybarite, and recommend the
perfect resort to suit each stage of that development. There’s plenty more
to come after that, including how to take your first ski holiday, why you
need to get fit and where to get A-list skiing at B-list prices.
But first, let’s deal with the question on everyone’s lips at this time of
year. Will it snow this winter? The short answer is, yes, of course it will.
Somewhere in Europe or North America, a resort is bound to be buried by the
white stuff in 2009-10.
Even during the “bad” winter of 2006-07 — the one when people claimed global
warming had more or less killed off skiing and snowboarding — some resorts
came close to breaking their snowfall records.
Whistler in Canada, for example, had its second-best snowfall ever that
season, with four metres falling in November alone (the final total was a
whopping 14.16 metres). Predicting exactly where this snow bonanza will
happen, however, is another matter altogether.
The Met Office’s “barbecue summer” fiasco showed that long-term forecasting is
an inexact science. Many forecasters in Europe refuse to do it at all, or
hedge their forecasts with big caveats.
Nevertheless, a few broad trends are becoming apparent. The first is that
we’re unlikely to have a cold autumn in Europe. The Swiss Office of
Meteorology and the Met Office both think temperatures will be near or above
average this time round.
Your Comments
Order By: