Scotland's five highland ski areas are struggling to maintain snow cover in to the Easter Holidays, which begin today across much of the country.
The Scottish Highlands have had a fairly unprecedented largely dry, stable weather pattern for much of February and March enabling the ski centres to set very high visitor numbers during the half term holidays last month.
This compensated to some extent for the centres being almost unable to open at all over Christmas and new year due to extreme weather conditions leaving centres stormbound or without adequate snow cover.
Now the question is how much can open for Easter? Over the past fortnight temperatures have crept up towards double figures with full sun at times in the valleys, leading to a widespread thaw.
However four of the five centres are still open, although three are stressing that conditions are better on their upper slopes with some broken ruins at lower elevations.
The Lecht is the centre that has been forced to close for snowsports due to the thaw. Glencoe (Pictured above today) on the west coast currently reports the best conditions with almost all runs open and complete.
Glenshee has limited terrain open on the upper mountain with no beginner runs available, Nevis Range was closed by strong winds on the upper mountain today and about half of Cairngorm's runs, on the upper mountain, are skiable.
Some forecasts are predicting 20-30cm of fresh snow over the coming week which could be good news.