Western US vs. Western Europe?

ChrisC

ChrisC

Well-known member
I'm a little suprised everyone seems to be chasing snow in the extreme South or North of USA.

I skied Telluride, Wolf Creek, Silverton over Christmas - and they were all passable. Average for this time of year - Telluride 3' of base, everything open - good coverage but some brush in gullies and rocks on Gold Hill.

However, this seems to be the year to head across the pond...Europe on a 2m - 6m base? I assume they will have superior base/conditions than CA, UT, CO, WY and MT this year.

Verbier http://www.verbinet.com/reports/snow.html
Chamonix http://www.chamonet.com/reports/snow.html
Val d'Isere http://www.valdinet.com/reports/snow.html

Shortly after 7am on December 16, the pisteur charged with measuring the snowfall at the permanent weather station just above Courchevel 1850 shook his head in astonishment. Then he crouched down on the edge of the piste to check and recheck the figures. It couldn’t be true, but it was. In just 10 pre-Christmas days more snow had fallen in the Trois Vallées than during the whole of last season.
At other resorts across the Alps an avalanche of similar records has since tumbled – and still the snow has continued to fall in prodigious quantities.
As the skies clear this weekend – for a few days at least – the level on top of the Valluga above St Anton is nudging the 600cm mark, with the snow piled 200cm deep in the town itself.
No one can remember anything that dramatic since 1999 – and then only in late February.
A trawl through historical snowfall figures shows that in general across much of the Alps up to four times the average for mid-January has fallen.
Click to expand...
 
I agree. I think that Europe having so much better snow than North America is such a rare occurrence that few folks even think about it. Not to mention that until mid-Dec Europe had no snow either so it's only recently that it is clear that this is a good year to hit Euro land.

All that said, My brother and I have been planning a trip to La Grave for a few years now and it just didn't work out for us last year to pull it off - when the snow, it turns out, was horrible in Europe. The trip is already booked for this year (with a few extra days in Chamonix area). Talk about getting lucky... Of course I still need to hope that they don't continue to get so much snow that we can't do any of the steeps from Avi danger and all, etc... A nice 1-2 foot dump just as we are arriving then nothing more than a few inches overnight for the next ten days or so would be a near perfect weather order...Where do I submit those orders again? :-k
 
I go by that old edict:
If the snow will not come to Mohammed... Mohammed will ski groomers until blocking ridges of high pressure move out.
 
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