With a clear diary for once and a good forecast I decided to take a day off and go skiing - after all skiing is what attracted me to work here in the first place!  Although we had lots of new snow over Easter this came with strong northerly winds and conditions could best be described as Baltic, including total white-out at the top of the hill for several days. Many of our Easter visitors never got a view and most were stuck on the Cas in what could only be described as challenging January conditions. But what a difference a day makes: yesterday the weather broke and winds dropped. The CairnGorm team had been working hard through the stormy days to try and ensure we could open the wider mountain as soon as possible and yesterday was the day! I have attached a few photos below. It was great to be able to ski the Ciste Gully, West Wall, East Face of the Gully, M2 and the rest…. With the temperature still at -8 at the top,  it meant that it was possible to piste the M2 all the way down to the Day lodge and off-piste snow was still light enough to enjoy and avoid the rocks!

The good news for Scottish skiing is that all 5 areas now have good snow and this provides a real opportunity for Scottish skiers to enjoy some excellent spring skiing into April. Being able to spread skiers around the 5 areas means that queuing is unlikely to be a problem. This is excellent news for the whole industry. We are particularly pleased for the Lecht; despite lots of snow this winter – the snow level has generally been higher up the mountain - over the last few weeks the Lecht has suffered, but now there is good snow at all levels and most importantly this has coincided with a holiday period.  Within the industry we believe it is important that all 5 areas continue to prosper.

Bob  

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 27th, 2008 at 12:09 pm and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.