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Yes, the multiple areas in one day bears a superficial resemblance to WST. But the amount of vertical skied even with changing out of ski boots and relocating a car blows my mind. At my pace even a modest size place like St. Foy would consume most of a ski day. Our first day at Les Arcs in...

I'll just say that the current era is difficult and giving the USA an unprecedented black eye reputation elsewhere in the world. We need to reserve judgment for at least a decade to determine whether this is an aberration or more lasting situation. It would have been a brief aberration if...

Fraser's favorite piste in the Alps. We skied it in April 2022 so only 5,925 vertical of it. We took several laps on Grand Col on both of our visits.

My EWR rental cars were in 2011, 2014, 2018 and 2024.

I wrote that a long time ago. Powder Mt. should not be on that list. I had no records of its snowfall and had a ski friend who raved about the place. 2000 was when I first started tracking percent of terrain open in-season. Loveland should not be on the list either due to extremely slow...

I've rented cars from EWR at least 4x. I don't even recall a parking garage. They were off site parking lots and yes navigation to them is a challenge.

Yes, I can see you have to make an airport choice in advance if it's a short trip. At Solden itself, it's probably only the two glaciers that are reliable early season. Kingslug gave a big thumbs down on a January trip there when weather did not cooperate, said lower sectors had lots of...

Detailed overview above is added to existing thread on the topic. An ominous point is that the Jordanelle water allotment for snowmaking is not unlimited. In fact the new water available to the new terrain is proportionately lower than what Deer Valley is utilizing on its prior terrain.

:eusa-doh: I realized I have some summary water-to-snow data from both Austria and Switzerland! West coast North America rain vs. snow incidence: Nov. > Dec. > Jan. + Apr. > Feb. + Mar. Nov. Dec. Jan. Feb. Mar. Apr. Alpine Mdws 7,000 20.9% 17.1% 15.3% 14.1% 13.9% 14.4% High Alps...

I would not make that statement for off piste. 2018-19 was an exceptionally banner early season through January at least for Austria and eastern Switzerland with repeated Nordstau storms. We scored that region a month after James did. And you would not say that such events are more likely in...

We had to go through Sydney to get to Broome in 2023. I would guess that fewer international destinations have direct flights to Brisbane vs. Sydney but probably the connections in the foreign countries make more sense than backtracking to Sydney. It's sort of like how our Alps trips from...

I'll agree with James on this one. You're betting mostly on snowmaking anyway. But you need to be monitoring the weather for maybe a month ahead. Rain events are the red flag for low altitudes in terms of both preventing snowmaking and setting back any that has already been done. Here's a...

SYD is one of my least favored airports for transfers. They make you reclaim baggage and schelp it from the international to the domestic terminal. We have done this twice, in 2019 and 2023. My guess is that this problem will be corrected at WSI. Montreal Mirabel airport was opened during...

Fraser: https://www.weathertoski.co.uk/top-10s/top-10-early-season-ski-resorts-europe/ If you read the above, the emphasis is upon higher and colder areas where snowmaking is more reliable and rain is rare. Having enough natural snow for off piste is more erratic, and the flexibility that...

Worldskitraveller's home page has a reference to Marko Schuster, who has skied 751 ski areas in 28 countries. This quote on Schuster's page caught my eye. Italy has Schuster's highest ski area count at 186. I came prepared for the crossing from Zermatt into Cervinia, here at top of Plateau...

His more detailed answer earlier in this thread: WST recognizes that the broad ski public and media relate more to counting ski areas vs. ski lifts, and so ski areas are a secondary objective. WST averages 8.4 lifts per area skied, identical to Oliver Kern and substantially more than Peter...

Of course I had to look it up and it hit one of my prejudice buttons being heavily south facing, like Crans-Montana and Flims-Laax. I asked Jimmy and he said he likes it much more than those places. Scuol is also quite remote from big population centers and thus I suspect not crowded. So it...

Yes, my presumption is that the trains are great if you going for a week from Geneva or Zurich to one ski region. But once the trip gets longer and moving from one ski area to another, no one wants to retrace to a hub to do that. ChrisC did do the research! I was certainly thinking in terms...

Done, those impressive scenery posts are now here.

I'll disagree with this. Whenever I found out, it was on his website somewhere. ChrisC and I Iikely "didn't get it" as WST's trip was unfolding because: We may have reasons to critique WST's ski priorities but I'll admit it wasn't entirely fair before we actually knew what they were...