Hautes-Alpes

As an oracle, you have to seek the divine and so I'm sitting at the end of the road in Valais just before the French border, waiting for Ullr's new powder revelation. The alert is valid until Wednesday.

Live from the Valais, I can tell you that Alarm 8 was actually very nice. Three days of powder and, surprisingly, three days of sunshine later, it's now alarm nine, which is valid until Monday, when alarm 10 should appear.

The meteorologist (and Wikipedia; forgive me) defines weather as: "The weather is the weather or is the weather conditions in a certain period of time (from several days to a season) related to a certain area".

Ahoy you powder pirates. Ullr has promised loot and now the dump is appearing in the telescopes. After the rain is before the snow. It has already started to snow, or rather to rain below 1600 to 2000 m, and will continue to snow until Tuesday night or early Tuesday morning, with the snow line dropping and it will also snow again at usable altitudes. There will be a westerly flow across the entire northern slope of the Alps, but the largest amounts will come from the Lower Valais to the French Hautes Alpes.

The Col de Larche, which is almost 2000 m high, offers a variety of different ski tours in the Italian-French border region between the Hautes Alpes (France) and the Italian Southern Alps.

The last alarm for a while, Ullr thinks, and sends us the next pack of Pow in the Alps, just in time for the carnival vacations. Ullr seems to have a soft spot for carnival fans and sends snow to the south and southwest. And in all likelihood, there will be a lot of it by Tuesday. This alert is only valid until Sunday, but I'll try to give you an idea of the total amounts.

Well, it won't be quite that extreme, but Ullr is finally flexing its muscles in the north this winter and is guaranteed to lure most freeriders to the Alps. This alert is valid until Saturday and then theoretically part two ("The two dumps") should follow from Saturday to Monday, depending on marginal lows, for which it is not yet clear whether they will come at all.

While kiters are busy at the top of the pass, the terrain around the Col de Vars offers a variety of different ski tours. The Vallon du Crachet is rewarding both in winter with powder and in spring with firn.

I dust off my electronic parchment, sharpen my wit and am pleased to present you with the first alarm of the meteorological winter. Ullr has seen sense and we are finally switching from late October to winter. Oh wait, wrong... There was more snow in the northern Alps at the end of October.

First of all, the following: It's not snowing in the south for once, but in the west and it won't start snowing again in the south until Sunday afternoon.

When you're on a roll, why stop, thinks Ullr and sends several dumps from the southwest towards the Alps. What does that mean? It snows again exactly where there is already a lot of snow and the north gets nothing or at least virtually nothing in the west of Switzerland. The first wave starts tonight (Thursday) and ends Friday night. The second wave starts on Saturday afternoon and lasts until Tuesday.

Let's start with the good news: The drought is over. In the medium term, something will come out of the sky again. But why wander far away when good things are so close - at least in terms of time?