Most of Europe's larger destination resorts are managing to open more groomed terrain for the Christmas and New Year holidays despite challenging weather conditions in the Alps.
The world's largest ski area, the 3 Valleys in France, reports more than 250 of its nearly 350 runs open for Christmas week. Other big areas are reporting they have 70-90% of their terrain open. They also report good conditions on groomed pistes, particularly above 2,000m, if not so much off.
The fact that ski areas have been opening more terrain counters some of the more pessimistic weather reports which have focussed on mild air in the alps over Christmas weekend which brought rain above 2,000m altitudes, damaging snow cover which, below 1500m altitude in particular, was thin anyway after a largely dry and warmer-than-average autumn.
Up high though, the rain did fall as snow with some areas with slopes up to or above 3,000m altitude reported up to 50cm of snowfall as the rain fell below.
As a result around a quarter of ski areas have still been unable to open for the 22-23 ski season, although most of these are small, local ski hills with relatively low altitude slopes, not so much the destination resorts.
It seems many of these had been holding back terrain that had been ready to open earlier in December until the Christmas and New Year crowds arrived to ski it.
An added complication in the Alps though is that the rain and mild air, along with strong winds at times, has destabilised the snowpack to create high avalanche danger in many off-piste areas.
Currently the region with the least terrain open is south eastern Europe where ski resorts in countries like Greece and Crystal Ski's new destination of Bosnia have been unable to open any runs while centres in Bulgaria, Serbia and Romania have opened with hardly any skiing possible so far with just short runs of machine made snow. This is due to very mild temperatures.