Turned out nice again (2)

by - 12:56 on 23 April 2007

Is there anything more depressing than a ski development out of season? All those wires and pylons and the boarded up café where you can almost still hear the chatter of pink-nosed frosty-breath skiing enthusiasts, discussing their turns over the hot chocolate. I thought this the other day as I plodded past the Glenshee ski area and tried not to look.

Here’s a picture looking north from the summit of Creag Leacach over the main road and the west side of the skiing area. And it isn’t as if there is simply not enough snow for skiing. There’s no snow at all! Somewhere in the murk in the background the high Cairngorms are still showing some snowfields but that’s all. The unsettling part is the date: April 15 2007. This might be global warming. I could not say. I’ve got some fine memories of skiing here in past Aprils, only tarnished by the equally vivid recollection of the compression fracture of my left leg I acquired here. (Hey, it could have happened to anyone.)

If you dip into Scotland’s Mountains by the famous mountain writer WH Murray he gives a summary of the development of skiing in Scotland. It includes the curious sentence ‘Any enthusiasm that survived the war was damped by a 10-year succession of snowless winters.’ So we have been here before – and no one had heard of global warming as Murray is referring to the period 1919-29. Makes you wonder about the boundless optimism that must have been tapped into to get the skiing places built in the first place, in the 1960s, let alone more recent developments. And it’s still possible this year is just a blip. Yeah, right.

Given that it’s unlikely that a bunch of engineers with spanners are going
to wonder up the hills, dismantle the metalwork and apologise to the mountain hares and ptarmigan, diversification becomes very important. As a very few examples, you can put your mountain bike on the gondola at Nevis Range, step into high-level shopping at Cairngorm straight off the funicular railway and go hurtling downhill on deval karts at the Lecht – and much, much more. And there will usually be a summer chairlift running. Leisure activities, retail outlets, refreshments and all sorts of fun - in short, there’s tons of stuff to do all year round at most of Scotland’s ski centres. Except ski a lot in some years.

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