November 12, 2009 – It’s been a dream start to the 2009/10 ski season for virtually every major ski region in the Northern hemisphere. Although the ski industry is wary of tempting fate after last year’s great snow season, it’s hard not to be happy with all the new snow that has already fallen, even if it is too early to tell what the winter will be like.

One of the big beneficiaries of the past week has been Italy where resorts already open such as Cortina have reported season to date snowfall already past 1.5m, and it’s not even mid-November. Austria still has the widest choice of ski areas open for a single country in the Alps. In Germany the famous Zugspitze glacier near Garmisch already has a 1.2m base.

There have been healthy snowfalls on Switzerland’s ski slopes too, although so far it’s still the glacier ski areas of Zermatt, Saas Fee and Les Diablerets (Glacier 3000) that are reported open. In France there have been big snowfalls in the Alps and the Pyrenees. However, only Tignes is open at the moment.

In the North, several resorts are open, including Ruka and Levi in Finland, while Vemdalen in Sweden plans to open on Saturday and Funäsdalen and Tänndalen are already open. This week both the Swedish and US Alpine Ski teams have been training on the slopes in Tärnaby prior to the FIS World Cup in Levi.

Resorts are opening daily across North America as the majority of US ski areas plan to open for the thanksgiving holiday in a fortnight’s time. In Canada Lake Louise opened last Friday. The Banff area has reported 63cm of new snow in the past few days. Blessed with this great early season snowfall and one of the world’s most sophisticated snowmaking systems, Lake Louise is preparing to welcome the FIS World Cup races later this month.

Continuing round the globe, in Asia the ski season looks to be days away in Japan whilst in New Zealand the last ski area known to be open in the Southern hemisphere closed at the weekend, bringing the long 2009 ski season to an end. Turoa on Mt Ruapehu still had more than two metres of snow lying on closing day.

courtesy of www.skiinfo.com