It was the first day of Autumn yesterday and that also marked the first day of skiing for 2011-12 at Austria's Stubai glacier near Innsbruck.
After "umming" and "ahhing" about when they'd open – largely because most of the glaciers in the alps were in a fairly dire state just a week ago following months of ice-thawingly warm temperatures; a cold front at the start of this week suddenly brought 20 – 50cm of new snow to the Alps – and transformed them overnight in to veritable powder heavens.
The snow is reported to have made it down to low elevations, and even left a foot of snow at Obergurgl – usually the first non-glacier resort to open in the Alps by mid-November each year, but that's still nearly two months away. It had had a dusting snow in August too.
After the Stubai, Pitztal is due to re-open this Saturday and Tignes a week late on September 1st. Others within the next few weeks are likely to include the Kitzsteinhorn glacier above Kaprun, Cervinia in Italy and Engelberg in Switzerland – some initially at weekends only.
Resorts still open from last spring include Saas Fee and Zermatt in Switzerland, Val Senales in Italy and the Tux glacier in Austria.
Across the Atlantic resorts in Colorado announced their first white covering last week and Copper Mountain says it plans to turn on the snowmaking guns next Monday. Whistler says it has had fresh snow too and pointed out this was a 'top up' of their base from last season which is still lying there, after their second greatest season snowfall accumulation on record. Resorts in California are saying the same thing and all are talking or another bumper snow 'La Nina' winter as predicted by weathermen. The first area to open though looks like Timberline in Oregon which expects to re-open on 28th September next week.
It's not all over in the southern hemisphere either. Ski areas are starting to close over the next few weekends but Turoa on new Zealand looks likely to stay open to November as usual as it has a 3m+ base.