{"id":1005,"date":"2011-12-05T10:15:24","date_gmt":"2011-12-05T09:15:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.oatridge.co.uk\/nic\/?p=1005"},"modified":"2011-12-05T10:20:39","modified_gmt":"2011-12-05T09:20:39","slug":"where-is-the-snow","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.oatridge.co.uk\/nic\/news\/where-is-the-snow\/","title":{"rendered":"Where is the snow?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Usually sometime in Autumn storms sweep across the Alps to\u00a0lay the foundation for the Winter sports season. The bigger the storms and the earlier, the better, provided the temperatures are low. This year, however, the Alps have seen unseasonably warm and sunny conditions… until now. Finally some snow is falling on the Alps and the resorts that open early can rely upon something other than tracked out glaciers and thin slivers of artificial snow to justify operating their lifts.<\/p>\n

Having said that, Zermatt, Samnaun and\u00a0Saas-Fee have had significant areas open from mid-November, but no resort runs. The 4 Vall\u00e9es now claim to have one resort run open, and fresh snow is falling on the villages of Saas-Fee and Zermatt, so\u00a0I would not be surpised to see valley runs open soon. With the storms set to break before the end of the week, it looks like the second weekend in December will finally provide some\u00a0do-able slopes.<\/p>\n

Something else to announce this week is the pre-launch of my new Swiss Winter Sports website at http:\/\/www.swisswintersports.co.uk<\/a>, designed to augment and build on the work I have put into the blog over the last year or so. It is not yet the finished article, but it is intended to provide the most comprehensive guide to winter sports in Switzerland based on first hand experience. In other words, I am using the best available resources to update the site so that\u00a0the information is as up-to-date as possible, but the text is based upon my own take of the resort. So far I’ve been working on the database, Javascript, PHP, CSS, HTML and\u00a0an RSS\u00a0 feed from MySwitzerland (still the best place for real-time resort information, and extensively cross-referenced on my site), so the look and feel, functionality and resort descriptions are still a little patchy, but over this season\u00a0I hope to improve the data and visit at least 20 or 30 resorts to further improve the data quality.<\/p>\n

It’s a tough challenge, but somebody has to do it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Usually sometime in Autumn storms sweep across the Alps to\u00a0lay the foundation for the Winter sports season. The bigger the storms and the earlier, the better, provided the temperatures are low. This year, however, the Alps have seen unseasonably warm and sunny conditions… until now. Finally some snow is falling on the Alps and the … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Where is the snow?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1005","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oatridge.co.uk\/nic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1005","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oatridge.co.uk\/nic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oatridge.co.uk\/nic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oatridge.co.uk\/nic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oatridge.co.uk\/nic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1005"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.oatridge.co.uk\/nic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1010,"href":"https:\/\/www.oatridge.co.uk\/nic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1005\/revisions\/1010"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.oatridge.co.uk\/nic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oatridge.co.uk\/nic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.oatridge.co.uk\/nic\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}