Snow Report, August 26

What a transformation!

Last week, in Chile, spring was in the air…

Snowing hard…

By yesterday morning Portillo was resporting 40cm of powder on the slopes, and Valle Nevado 72cm. It’ll probably turn out to be the dump of the season there.

Meanwhile, both New Zealand and Australia have had sunny weeks with little in the way of new snow. In NZ, the last heavy snowfall was nearly two weeks ago, and the action has switched back from powder to corduroy.

Currently, The Remarkables near Queenstown reports 110-180cm of cover on its trails, and the Wanaka resort of Treble Cone has 58-242cm.

In Australia, the Snowy Mountain resort of Perisher is hosting The Mile Hile 2014, part of the Australian Slopestyle Tour. Conditions were pretty good for the practice sessions (see the video below): but today dawned foggy, warm and slushy, and they had to postpone the day’s events.

Currently, the snow report records cover up to 158cm deep on the slopes at Perisher.

Back in Europe, the Alps had a lovely weekend. This was sunrise over the Parc National des Ecrins near Serre Chevalier in France on Saturday.

Pictured, below, was Zell Am See in Austria’s Salzburgerland on Sunday.

But there was a little fresh snow around at altitude last week, and conditions on the glaciers are pretty good given it’s the end of August. Pictured below is how it was looking on August 21 on the Hintertux glacier in the Tirol.

Only a handful of Alpine glacier ski areas are currently open – the Hintertux, the Molltaler, Zermatt, Les Deux Alpes and Saas-Fee. Les Deux Alpes shuts at the weekend at the end of its summer season, but several more Austrian glaciers are due to open again in September, if the snow’s good.

Here’s some rather lovely video shot on the glacier at Saas-Fee earlier this month…

The outlook for the Alps is now distinctly unsettled. There’ll be heavy rain in the west today, showers in the east, and maybe a little more fresh snow at altitude.

	France: the summer ski season is now over in Tignes. The glacier reopens in October 4 and will stay open until the start of the proper winter season. Meanwhile, above Les Deux Alpes, summer skiing continues until August 30.
	Switzerland: Zermatt’s glacier is in pretty good shape, considering it’s August. The resort reports cover up to 120cm deep on the 14 pistes currently open for skiing. The glacier above Saas-Fee is open for summer skiing too: but not today, as the weather has already closed in. There, the settled cover is 222cm deep.
	Austria: you can currently ski on the Hintertux glacier east of Innsbruck, as well as the Molltaler glaicer near Flattach. On the Hintertux, 18km of pistes are open, and the snow is up to 110cm deep.
	Italy: you can currently access glacier skiing on the Swiss-Italian border from Cervinia, when conditions allow.
	Andorra: Andorra’s ski resorts are now closed.
	Western USA: The Rocky Mountain ski season finally finished in June. But let’s not forget that in in late September they’ll be cranking up the snow cannons again in Loveland and Arapahoe Basin if conditions are right. If you want to ski now, head to Timberline Lodge on Mount Hood in Oregon.
	Western Canada: the short summer skiing season on the the Horstman above Whistler has now finished.