 Poster: A snowHead
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| snowball wrote: |
| Has it been open at all in recent years? |
I used it in on the 5th March 2005, so it was definitely open that day.
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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The last time I stayed the night in Ballachulich - the village next to Glen Coe (last summer) the people in the B & B still had skis in the back hall (they had been keen skiers when I visited in the past) but said they hadn't skied for several years because the snow was seldom good enough.
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Well they clearly weren't trying. Last season 06/07 was poor, but it was still possible to ski from December to late April at the gorms (I can't comment about elsewhere as I mainly ski the gorms and the clash). However 05/06 was absolutely brilliant. The ski areas were loaded with snow from late February to mid April and skiable into May. I skied 27 days in scotland that season, mainly weekends. I had my last day of lift served skiing on the weekend of the 7th May and was also skiing at Cairngorm on 24th June. If they couldn't find a day to get out and ski in exceptional conditions in March and April 06 then they have no interest in sking.
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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http://news.independent.co.uk/uk/this_britain/article3247568.ece
There goes the Indy yet again. Has the axe has been sharpened after the complaints to the PCC about their editorial saying that the Scottish mountains in winter were ideal for sedate walks! 
Classic:
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| The ski resort at Glenshee has the Cairngorm Mountain Railway, a funicular railway built with £20m of public money. |
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Winterhighland, Ok, it's a downbeat article but, apart from the Glenshee Cairngorm gaffe, it's relatively measured for a national newspaper article and the writer would be able to substantiate the "facts" he's referred to (whether they are strictly accurate in your view or not - by the way, clearly NOT an MBO). Luckily it's amazing just how few people actually read this stuff and I'd be stunned if such publicity was making the difference. Lack of effective promotion by the ski areas, low-cost flights to the alps from Ed/Gla and a whole heap of word-of-mouth is killing the market. The negative word-of-mouth is allowed to flourish thanks to the sheer lack of positive PR. Don't know the complex answer to that but someone somewhere needs to start investing in a marketing push now.
For nostalgic reasons I wanted to take the family to Aviemore over New Year. Frankly, the prices I was quoted to rent a simple 2/3 bed house/cottage simply didn't compute - there's a degree of greed in them thar hills. Ludicrous prices being asked and, given that I live in the deep Saarf, the overall cost including getting to/from simply meant it didn't feel like value. Customers lost, going elsewhere. The same maths would come into play if we lived in Glasgow so it's not strictly a geographical thing.
Scottish skiing needs to re-invent itself. The die-hards will always be there but without luring the massed ranks of softer leisure travellers, it'll always struggle. VFM is what counts.
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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| Quote: |
| For nostalgic reasons I wanted to take the family to Aviemore over New Year. Frankly, the prices I was quoted to rent a simple 2/3 bed house/cottage simply didn't compute - there's a degree of greed in them thar hills. |
Out of interest did you just look at the one place? But to be honest New Year is def not the time to do Scotland if your looking to stick to a reasonable budget, people all over the world associate New Year with Scotland, so demand is massive! I know some people who rented out their homes for New Year almost a year ago for over £800 and even now their getting offers saying we'll pay you half as much again to let it to us, this suggests that customers will be lost anyway because far more people want to stay than there is accommodation at New year.
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| The negative word-of-mouth is allowed to flourish thanks to the sheer lack of positive PR. |
VisitScotland used a few seconds of snowboarding in an Autumn/Winter advertising campaign, and got torn too shreds by wholly unjustified and wildly inaccurate media attacks on them for promoting snowsports in the era of global warming that culminated in the absurd and downright dangerous Indy editorial. The Scottish Mountains in winter despite their lack of height compared to the Alps can be amongst the most difficult and challenging mountaineering undertakings around, they are certainly no place for a "sedate walk".
VisitScotland isn't feeling inclined to go through that again and it may have contributed to the demise of the annual Ski Scotland brochure that had previously been printed every autumn from 1962 till 2006. Not only are the press pushing the negative PR, their actively attacking anyone daring to try positive PR.
The maths you talk about comes down to the way the UK is. The Scottish Areas are charged VAT on lift tickets, EU Alpine areas are not as they are classed as public transport. Fuel Duty is the highest in the world and given the centric nature of distribution in the UK, it makes for the highest fuel prices in rural areas - I'm pretty confident that the highest petrol prices in the World are in the Scottish Highlands and Islands, and it pushes up the cost of everything.  Trust me they are far from being greedy with the prices they charge, in plenty of cases they're actually making a loss on the fuel, indeed in some villages you need a 60mile round trip now just to fill up with fuel given the rate rural filling stations are going bust, it's absurd. 
You can fly to the Alps from Glasgow for less than it costs to drive a modest car up to Glencoe or CairnGorm from Glasgow. There is something far far wrong with that and shows what a lie the claim that fuel duty is a green tax really is.
[/rant] 
Last edited by Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do. on Fri 14-12-07 0:43; edited 1 time in total
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| Winterhighland wrote: |
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| The ski resort at Glenshee has the Cairngorm Mountain Railway, a funicular railway built with £20m of public money. |
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Excellent - and from the profits raised from the sale of the purple eyesore to Glenshee we can reinstate the Cairngorm chairlifts.
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Just to sober up those who view the past of Scottish skiing through rose tinted spectacles, let me offer you a quote from 1964/65 "Winter Sports in Scotland" brochure (published by the then Scottish Tourist Board and Scottish Council for Physical Recreation):
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| The official Scottish season starts in mid-December and ends at the beginning of May. It is often possible to ski before the end of November and in 1963 skiers were out in the mountains at weekends until June. The winter of 1964 was very mild and ski-iing conditions were below average, but this was also true of many European resorts. There is no regular pattern of snowfalls, but in the higher corries good ski runs can always be found above the 2,500 feet contour during the first three months of the year. The season reaches it's peak in March and April when spring sunshine adds pleasure to longer days on the hills and high-level ski-ing becomes safer. This is the time for cross-country expeditions into the wilder passes of the mountains |
In fact IIRC although underplayed above 1964 was, and remains, the worse season on record!
Anyway, how does this compare to the last few years
2005/06 - lift served (or at least funicular served) snowsports commenced at Cairngorm on the 27th November (with Glenshee and The Lecht opening more of their lifts than Cairngorm that same weekend), however by the 17th of December a thaw had wreaked havoc with the top to bottom coverage seen earlier in December leaving a base on only the upper runs which was broken but frozen hard by the end of the month. A period of very cold but crucially dry weather ensued leaving little in the way of lift served snowsport until 28th of January when a small snowfall allowed some upper pistes to open with larger amounts of snow following but another thaw a few days later closed the lifts again until more snow arrives for the 10th of February after which condition improved slightly until around the second of march when the heavens opened and substantial amounts of new snow (powder IIRC  ) were deposited all over the Scottish Highlands- for a couple of weeks thereafter conditions across the Scottish ski areas could be described as epic, particularly by all accounts in the back bowl at Nevis! Some fluctuations in snow cover ensued again until another major dump around the 9th of April which blanketed the entire mountain - lift served skiing finally ended on the 7th of May 2006.
2006/07 - early November saw many taking their first turns on Cairngorm with lift served snowsports commencing on the 25th November 2006 and ran until the 14th of April 2007. Not a classic season but Cairngorm managed better than many low level Alpine resorts.
2007/08 (current season) - lift served skiing commences on Cairngorm on Saturday the 1st of December with earlier snowfalls seen in September when some keen of locally based skiers got their first turns in on Cairngorm. Many others got their first turns in late November (23rd) after another more substantial snowfall.
If anyone doubts any of those the photographic and written evidence is on Winterhighland for all to see - sorry for the Gorm bias of this but but the info is easier to find - if you want to find available information about the other resorts again check out Winterhighland but I think it'd be fair to say typically they open a wee bit later than Cairngorm and close a week or two earlier.
Anyway 2005/06 could be summed up as a slow starter but when it got going it was superb and lasted into May. 2006/07 wasn't the best but managed to be consistent enough for almost 5 months of continuous lift served snowsports, add at least another few weeks to that if you like hiking or skinning up. The current season has started already and in good time but of course it remains to be seen what will happen over the coming months.
So, is this substantially worse than the early 1960's - I'm not convinced it is to be honest!
What has changed though are, as I've said before, our expectations and the cost of flights and transport which all now tend to favour resorts on the continent despite there still being good sport to be had in Scotland. I suspect that without substantial investment, including modern snowmaking, a coherent PR campaign and less unfavourable press coverage Scotland stands little chance of getting it's message across and it'd be a great shame if ski areas were lost as a result.
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after which condition improved slightly until around the second of march when the heavens opened and substantial amounts of new snow (powder IIRC ) were deposited all over the Scottish Highlands- for a couple of weeks thereafter conditions across the Scottish ski areas could be described as epic, particularly by all accounts in the back bowl at Nevis! Some fluctuations in snow cover ensued again until another major dump around the 9th of April which blanketed the entire mountain - lift served skiing finally ended on the 7th of May 2006.
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That first weekend in March was probably not the weekend to ski at Cairngorm, because there was snow in the central belt at low level, everyone and his dog turned up at Cairngorm and the place was heaving. I had planned to be there, but decided the road conditions were likely to be iffy for gauranteeing getting there and back safely. Instead I drove over to Huntly and did some tele skiing at the ski centre there, and in the hills close to Huntly, including a tour over the CLashmac in 2 feet of fluffy dry powder  . Cairngorm was great after that, as the snow had time to form a decent base and, unfortunately for the ski centres, three qtrs of the punters steadily disappeared as the snow melted outside their windows in the central belt, so the queues were minimal. I skiied every weekend from then until my last day of lift served skiing on the sunday May 7th.
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One of the problems for the skiing industry in Scotland is that there are several companies chasing a smallish number of potential customers, and none of them have the budget or marketing skills to be able to do it effectively. They either need to find a way to broaden the target (e.g. bringing in people from further afield), or to get the word out more effectively, which (gasp) may involve them getting together to run an ad campaign to encourage people to ski in Scotland. It is exactly this sort of low-budget, high return advertising need that benefits most from unconventional advertising methods (such as viral marketing), but I've seen nothing to suggest that the industry is even twitching, never mind alive and kicking.
It has always been the case that the Scottish resorts draw maybe 90% of their customers from Scotland, and from the central belt in particular, with many of the rest coming from the north of England. Almost everyone drives to the resort, as public transport is expensive and/or inconvenient, and the "transfer time" is higher than for holidays they might take in Europe - this forum constantly sees requests for resort recommendations where a low transfer time is a key requirement, so the days of a 4-hour drive to get the ski area are passing.
There are many things lacking in the Scottish resorts - snowmaking, lift technology, variety, mountain restaurants, and so on - which are now taken for granted in the Alps and where the lack of such facilities is a major factor in deciding where to go. When alpine resorts have gondolas, heated chairlifts with shields, 90% snowmaking, and a choice of 18 mountain restaurants for hot chocolate breaks and lunch, Scotland looks like the very poor relative who only gets seen at Christmas. This is not to say that Scotland can't provide all of this - it could, but the investment required would be huge, and the banks are not prepared to lend for skiing projects in Scotland, as they have nothing to evaluate the loan risk against but a string of failed companies and bad debts. If you want to borrow £50M in Scotland to build (yet another) golf course, the banks will listen. If you want £25M to build a ski resort, you'll hear the laughter in London. Sad, but true.
It has always been a regret for me that I've never skied in Scotland, as I'm Scottish. However, I only took up skiing in my early 30s, long after I'd been forced into economic migration, and the lack of holiday time coupled with the relative ease of getting to the Alps and the certainty that I can ski when I get there has always made it impossible for me to ski in Scotland. I will some day, and if I lived in the central belt again, I'd do it regularly, but an 800 mile round trip to ski 700 metres of slush doesn't hold any appeal, which is what I might find when I'd booked my leave 2 weeks in advance and gone on the off-chance that it would be OK.
[Edited for typos]
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| Dave Horsley wrote: |
| That first weekend in March was probably not the weekend to ski at Cairngorm, because there was snow in the central belt at low level, everyone and his dog turned up at Cairngorm and the place was heaving. |
Don't I know it Dave - I was stupid enough to to head up that weekend and after blagging my way up the hill, 'coz they'd already closed it off because they couldn't cope with the numbers, had the dubious pleasure of standing tin the Ciste car park for gawd knows how waiting for a bus to the Cas (wither the Ciste chair!)
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| I had planned to be there, but decided the road conditions were likely to be iffy for gauranteeing getting there and back safely. |
Good call, I almost didn't make it down to Forres that evening and only got over the moors because a snowplough appeared out of nowhere and I followed it - prior to that I seriously thought I was going to get stuck in a snowdrift!
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| Instead I drove over to Huntly and did some tele skiing at the ski centre there, and in the hills close to Huntly, including a tour over the CLashmac in 2 feet of fluffy dry powder . |
Sensible man! 
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| Cairngorm was great after that, as the snow had time to form a decent base and, unfortunately for the ski centres, three qtrs of the punters steadily disappeared as the snow melted outside their windows in the central belt, so the queues were minimal. I skiied every weekend from then until my last day of lift served skiing on the sunday May 7th. |
Yup, it was dead after that with the only the diehards out on May the 6th and 7th plus me and my daughter 
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snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
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I never doubted that there are many times when the skiing in Scotland is still very good. The problem is that you cannot book well in advance and know that there will be a worth while amount of snow. The two times I mentioned turning up, in recent years, at Nevis would be listed as times there was lift based skiing available. but it was a long way from the marvelous idea of 700 metres of slush which ousekjarr suggests as putting him off, which I would have skied all day with pleasure. There was actually only a few metres of flat skiing on the summit run open the last time, and only a tiny bit more the time before.
Any attempt to get people to book holidays in scotland months in advance as they do elsewhere is going to to lead to large numbers of disgruntled punters swearing they will never go again. The publicity needs to be realistic - countering the extreme bad publicity at present but making it clear that Scotish skiing needs to be opportunistic. Perhaps getting the press to agree to publicise the times when there is good snow, or even just good coverage, might be the way forwards.
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And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
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^ totally agree with you snowball it's definitely a lottery if you want to book ahead and that's where other places like The Alps definitely win out. Also totally agree with what you say about publicity, at the moment it's very poor and all too often unrealistically negative, like the stuff we've mentioned in The Scotsman etc.
However I think in the short term that with a bit of imaginative snowfarming and in the longer term with investment in snowmaking the situation could be very much improved and availability of pistes made far more reliable.
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snowball,
I don't deny that the main market is oportunistic skiing from locals. But the problem is that locals are telling you that they haven't skiied in scotland for several years because the snow was never good enough to make it worth while. I'm saying that that isn't true -from personal experience as a localish skiier who skis in scotland regularly.
And what are the ski centres/ visit scotland to do. They do a nice little TV advert that includes a couple of shots of some ice climbing and a brief clip of someone boarding the Cas at Cairngorm in fairly average conditions and what happens. Some idiot of a journo on SoS writes a piece of utter rubbish claiming that the tourist authorities are lying to the public in their adverts, which then gets taken up elsewhere in the press. All this just leads people to the further impression that it is no longer possible to ski in Scotland on a regular basis. The regular drip drip of articles saying there is no snow in scotland etc. is very dificult to counter by the ski centres.
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You know it makes sense.
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Dave Horsley, yes, I agree. And I told the people at the B & B as much. I was interested, though, that living literally just down the road from the slopes those people thought it.
I think part of the trouble was that their son had been the keenest skier who might have investigated for himself, and he had left home. Still, there were 5 pairs of skis in the hall not being used.
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Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
Otherwise you'll just go on seeing the one name:
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One thing we need for sure is an increase in youngsters taking up snowsports. It's now going back more than 20 years to the teachers strikes in the mid 80s that were all but engineered by the Tory Government, the fall out decimated extra circular activities in Scotland and in many areas they never really got going again, and in the past decade esp near hysterical H&S has further damaged Schools participation in mountain recreation.
A generation was largely lost to outdoor recreation, but the proliferation of indoor climbing walls, new freestyle dry slopes and Xscapse has started to turn this around, but the whole outdoor sports scene needs to tap into this and get these kids out from inside and onto the mountains.
To highlight the point, one day last season on CairnGorm as I joined the queue at the middle station waiting for the Funicular, a retired former employee at CML quipped to me "So what's it like to be the only person under 70 in the queue". 
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Poster: A snowHead
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[quote="roga"]^ totally agree with you snowball it's definitely a lottery if you want to book ahead and that's where other places like The Alps definitely win out.
Cast your mind back to last year and the mega panic of folks who had prebooked their Alps holidays and were looking at green fields.......
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Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
Obviously A snowHead isn't a real person
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| ropetow wrote: |
| Cast your mind back to last year and the mega panic of folks who had prebooked their Alps holidays and were looking at green fields....... |
Very true but Scotland has *always* been that bit more marginal, I'd suggest in the past skiers were more willing to take pot luck but now most other parts of the world have snowmaking Scotland seems that much more of a gamble. For example last year we headed over to Les Gets in Portes de Soleil at Xmas and being relatively low they'd had very little snow at all, all the same they'd managed to open at least 15/20% of the runs just on a base of machine made snow. If they hadn't invested in the snowmaking they'd have been closed altogether - Morzine was actually far worse than Les Gets. Now 20/30 years ago the whole place would have had no snowports at all because they had no snowmaking and that would have been true of many resorts in a season like last year (the mention of the bad 1964 season in that quote I gave above supports this I feel). When that was the norm Scotland wasn't so very different whereas today the difference is big and leads many people understandably to take the safer snowmaking supported option.
Personally I don't think that much has changed with the 'marginality' of Scottish skiing (despite all the climate change doom and gloom), the 60s were as marginal as things are now whereas in the late 70s/early 80s there was a run of excellent season as I recall but then things returned to being closer to the 60s. A lot of people (myself included) remember that run of excellent seasons in the 80s and tend to think it's got an awful lot worse in comparison. I think there's an element of truth and an element of rose tinted spectacles involved in that view but taking a longer term view it's not significantly worse IMHO, although it may be marginally worse at times. I used to head up every weekend with my school to Cairngorm in the late 70s/early 80s but even then remember one year (wish I could remember which) when we ended up only getting onto the hill a couple of times (our school season being from January until March IIRC), if there was snow the ski road was blocked and shut and if that wasn't the case it had all melted and nothing was open - sound familiar?!
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Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
Well, the person's real but it's just a made up name, see?
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At the risk of running off topic quite a bit - a big difference is the fact that the pistes at Les Gets are alpine meadows with nary a rock in sight which allows them to get running on the merest hint of snow. Contrast that with the rock strewn runs in Scotland. Is Scotland the only country in the EU that are not prepared to run the bulldozer over the runs ? Doesnt seem to be a problem in every other European resort i've skied in.
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You need to Login to know who's really who.
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| ropetow wrote: |
| At the risk of running off topic quite a bit - a big difference is the fact that the pistes at Les Gets are alpine meadows with nary a rock in sight which allows them to get running on the merest hint of snow. Contrast that with the rock strewn runs in Scotland. |
Absolutely, it takes a lot more snow to make the Scottish pistes skiable.
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| Is Scotland the only country in the EU that are not prepared to run the bulldozer over the runs ? Doesnt seem to be a problem in every other European resort i've skied in. |
It's not a matter of their being unwilling, they aren't allowed to for conservation reasons and when you see the mess that's been made of some European mountains as a result of bulldozer activity I can see why.
There other factor is the history of the mountains, whereas the runs in the Alps are often high level farming meadows historically and have a history of being cleared of rocks and debris for pasture and grazing well before snowsports ever appeared the Scottish hills were essentially wilderness and once any tree cover had been cut down hundreds of years ago were left as inhospitable wilderness and remain so to this day. The conservation and mountaineering lobbies in Scotland are pretty influential and, apart from the fact they'd love to close down every Scottish ski area, every single change to the mountain environment ends up going through interminable public enquiries etc. which can take years. This is costly and would preclude any drastic action like bulldozing pistes, particularly somewhere like Cairngorm which a designated area, a national park and one of the last great 'wilderness' areas in western Europe.
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Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
Anyway, snowHeads is much more fun if you do.
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What exactly would stop a landowner from removing rocks and boulders from their land ? I've seen plenty of instances where this has been done to 'improve grazing'.
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You'll need to Register first of course.
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ropetow, in the national park it'd lead to prosecutution and, as Sage says, it'd be impractical anyway given the nature of the terrain.
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Vastly better article about Glencoe in The Herald today - click here
Just goes to show decent journalism may be dead at The Scotsman and SOS but it's not dead at at least one other Scottish newspaper.
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You'll get to see more forums and be part of the best ski club on the net.
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Good article. He seems to agree that quick and continuing publicity when conditions allow good skiing is the key.
Yes, I heard before that there is the same amount of snow falling now in Scotland, but generally it just melts quicker. My main memory of Scottish skiing is of boilerplate that was just there through the season so I usually planned my visits well in advance. That is what has changed since the 80s.
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snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
snowHeads are a friendly bunch.
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Winterhighland, Interesting thread.
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I've said it elsewhere and I'll say it again - I'm gobsmacked at this level of dishonesty from the Scottish press - it really is quite outrageous that this is going on!
What can we do
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Perhaps to defend the ski area you could start a thread here for Scottish skiers to post photos and chat about conditions in the winter and in the summer to promote the all year activity etc. I'm sure it would be hugely interesting for everyone here
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And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
And love to help out and answer questions and of course, read each other's snow reports.
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I think many of the Scottish resorts were aiming to open their lifts this week but I notice that all the resorts say "not enough snow for uplift" and look very bare, except Cairngorm which has 3 lifts open and the general snow cover on the hill looks patchy. I gather you can only ski down about half way and then have to walk. ( see http://ski.visitscotland.com/conditions/ ).
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snowball,
Pretty normal for scotland. East coast resorts generally tend to open first just after Christmas, and the best skiing is usually february - end april. West coast resorts generally start a liitle later. The early Dec skiing as seen this year is not oncommon, but the mid december thaw is also normal. The long term temperature records show a warming during the midlle of december before it starts cooling down again late december.
Frosty,
Best places for pictures of scottish skiing is on www.winterhighland.info
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FAQ
