It’s only a few days from the start of May and 99% of ski areas have now closed for the season, but that’s not stopped mother nature from delivering heavy snow to western North America and to the Alps over the past few days.
The snowfall is ongoing in the Alps and appears to be particularly heavy in Switzerland, where it currently looks more like mid-winter than mid-Spring. However there’s also been significant snowfall in France and Austria. So far the Diablerets glacier near Gstaad has posted the biggest accumulation of 40cm but most other ‘still open’ ski areas have had significant fresh snow too including the Pitztal glacier and Solden in Austria and Chamonix in France, which each report around 15cm of fresh snow.
Across the Atlantic there have been larger falls still, the biggest in California where Mammoth (open to the end of May) reported a remarkable 1m in 72 hours and there was about half that at Alpine Meadows (pictured above) to the north. Further inland the falls was smaller but still significant with a foot of fresh snow for Snowbird in Alta and 20cm at Mt Bachelor in Oregon.
