The Alps and Pyrenees have been enjoying glorious sunny weather for pretty much all of April - so conditions are ideal for great spring skiing.
With warm daytime temperatures snow will obviously soften up, and then re-freeze at night when the temperature drops. This means that early morning snow will be bullet-proof, gradually softening during the day as the temperature rises.
However there is a point, just as the snow is starting to transform from rock-hard concrete, but before it gets to slush, where the ground beneath your feet is like velvet, and skiing on it can be as pleasurable an experience as powder.
This is the real trick of spring skiing - capturing that brief point in time when the slope is at the perfect aspect and temperature. It will give you one or two perfect runs and then it's time to move on to a different slope with a different aspect. However for those two runs you can be experiencing real "hero snow" - where you will feel like you can do no wrong!
In North America, it's called corn snow and Mark Elling, a professional guide at Cat Ski Mt Bailey in Oregon describes the process below:
"Warm days melt the snowpack, allowing small cold grains to merge together, forming larger crystals. Clear, cold nights in the spring re-freeze these wet, larger crystals and they become slightly more angular (squarish, like a kernel of baby corn). The longer the melt-freeze cycle continues, the larger these grains become.
It may take many days of melt-freeze cycling to produce ideal corn skiing conditions. The morning following a freeze this corn layer at the top of the snowpack is solid as a rock—boilerplate, but hopefully not for long. At some point during the day either the sun’s radiation or the day’s rising ambient air temperature (or both) begins to soften the top layer of this solid melt-freeze “corn crust” and velvety, highly-edgeable corn skiing is born..." Read the full article..
If you're on a ski holiday this week, it's worth bearing this in mind. A lot of people, put off by the hard early morning conditions, will head out a bit later and miss the transformation - just getting to it 15 minutes late can make a massive difference!
The forecast for most alpine areas is for more sunshine today and tomorrow - but with a possible change in the weather later in the week.
