Europe's largest ski areas have begun moving towards full opening for Christmas and new year with the amount of area offering 200km or more of open slopes jumping from one to six this weekend.
For the past three weeks only the Samnaun-Ischgl cross-border Swiss-Austrian ski area had offer over 200km of slopes open, but it's now dropped to sixth place with other big areas overtaking it.
The world's biggest area the 3 Valleys in France is now in top spot for available terrain with 377km of its 600km of slopes now open. It reports the snow lying a metre deep even on its lowest slopes at 1100m altitude at Courchevel Saint Bon, with 1.8 metres up high. Les Menuires, which opened this weekend, is pictured top.
Despite having a third less terrain with and reporting only a third of the lower slope depth of the 3 Valleys, the Swiss 4 Valleys around Verbier is almost 90% open already with 362 of its 412 km of slopes open. It's posting snow depths of 35 to 110cm.
The Arlberg region of St Anton and Lech has overtaken Ischgl/Samnaun for Austria's most open terrain to move into third spot with 75% (220km) of its 301km of slopes open. It also has deeper snow, up to 2.6 metres up top.
Then it's Zermatt/Cervinia and the Skiwelt including Soll and Ellmau also having more than 200km of slopes open.