European Diary:The clumps of grass and rock poking through the snow on the peaks at Les Deux Alpes winter sports resort in France last week were a hazard even for experienced skiers.
But for a novice they were enough to get me checking the fine print on my health insurance policy and vowing to rethink my ambitious winter sports comeback.
It has been 10 years since I last took to the ski slopes in Europe, and while I knew that my own physical condition had deteriorated somewhat since my last ski trip, I had not expected the Alps to undergo a similar transformation. Yet on arrival at one of Europe's highest ski resorts in the depths of winter it felt a touch eerie to be greeted by teeming rain and danger signs warning of a lack of snow.
"We used to get good snow for skiing around November time but now it generally comes in January," explained my 46-year-old ski instructor, Philippe, who has lived on the mountain all his life. "I remember that 20 years ago we usually had a snow depth here of around 17 metres, but in recent years it is only about two metres deep."
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) pinpoints climate change as a serious risk to the future of ski resorts.
In a report last month it warned that global warming could devastate European resorts within decades. German resorts are most at risk because they lie at low altitudes. A 1° increase in average temperatures would lead to a 60 per cent decrease in the number of naturally snow-reliable ski areas. Austria and Italy were next among the five Alpine countries studied in terms of susceptibility to climate change, followed by France and Switzerland.
Les Deux Alpes is one of the luckier resorts in Europe, due to its location. The ski village is situated at 1,650 metres above sea level and nestles below a glacier, which means that some of its runs stretch up to 3,600 metres. At this height winter sports fans are guaranteed there will be snow on the upper slopes for most of the season.
"We are going to be busier here because of the lack of snow at other resorts at lower levels and there is a trend towards people booking later to enable them to check the snow reports," says Pete Foreman, co-owner of the tour operator scuba-ski.com, which organises trips to Les Deux Alpes. "In fact the property prices at this resort have more than doubled in six years, which is probably a good bet on global warming."
But the warm weather experienced in November and December in Europe (estimated to be the hottest for 1,300 years in the Alpine region by one Austrian climatologist) is playing havoc with ski resorts on lower slopes. Last week a prestigious world cup event in Slovenia was moved from its host resort of Maribor due to lack of snow, while several earlier world cup events had to be cancelled in France and Switzerland.
The lack of snow is causing financial problems for some destinations. Banks in Switzerland are already refusing to lend money to resorts below an altitude of 1,500 metres. Meanwhile, the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter has reported that SkiStar AB, the largest owner of Nordic ski resorts, recently shelved plans to hire 250 temporary workers.
In the absence of natural snow resorts are increasingly turning to cannons that pump out artificial snow to keep the slopes open. But this consumes a lot of water and energy and affects the landscape and ecology. Also, it is not a long-term solution if temperatures keep rising above a certain threshold as the artificial snow will simply melt away.
Three days into my own sojourn at Les Deux Alpes the snow finally began to fall in sufficient quantities to cover the bare spots on the slopes. But as the grass and rocks gradually submerged under a blanket of white, I couldn't help wondering if winter sports will some day become possible only on the highest slopes.