Bit of a long shot this, but maybe someone has been down to GAP this weekend to watch the World cup skiing: done on trucked in snow lower down I understand!

Anyway, I fly out to Germany tomorrow morning for nine days walking/snowshoeing. All around GAP.

There is snow forecast for most of the coming week from about 1500m upwards, but it hasn't started falling yet!

So it would help to know where the snow level is on the slopes above the Hausberg and Kreuzeck cable car Berg stations. My initial plan is to head up above those to around Osterfelderkopf for some snowshoeing, if there is still any snow on these North facing slopes. From the Wankcam it looks like the snow line may start somewhere around 1500m, but it is not that clear.

If there is no snow left there at present I'll probably go for some non snowshoes walks straight for where I'm staying in Farchant and wait for the snow to accumulate. Hopefully!

Just in case anyone else picks this thread up later.

In what has been reported as the warmest Bavarian winter for 100 years with temperatures an average 4 degrees C above normal, (that's 7 degrees F), I did manage to find decent snows on the North facing slopes above Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria.

It was important to arrive just as new snow was falling as that gave snow from around 1300m and more than I could cope with "off piste" so as to speak at 1900m! But on the North facing slopes. After three good days doing what counts as snowshoeing for me, (plus a semi rest day), the warm weather returned and I was able to get up to 1600m to 1800m on SW facing mountains just with normal hiking boots and without having to do more than a few short bits "post holing". I think the valley temp got up to 18 C one day, (start of March), or 64 F in that warmer weather.

http://www.wetter.com/v2/?SID=&LOC=0915 ... wispid=406

http://www.lawinenwarndienst-bayern.de/ ... 2007-03-09

Thanks Diego, I've got one of those bookmarked and I'll add the other one.

I did find out something interesting during my trip. And that is I used to see what the valley snow depth on the ski reports was as a guide to how far down the mountains the snow level was.

Not so!

The valley depth reported for the ski runs at Garmisch is just the very narrow ski "home run" that allows the skiers to ski down the whole way to the valley stations of the Kreuzeck and Osterfelderkopf cable car stations. So they can then use the cable cars to get up high again etc.

But this ski run is not natural snow at the bottom end this year. It's made by snow cannons when the temperature is low enough, and during my trip the snow cannons were lined up at the bottom part waiting to be used. (I think some snow was also brought in from Austria by lorries to keep the lower part of the Kandahar ski run open for the recent round of the World Cup when it was too warm to use the snow cannons). So it's just a very narrow strip of icy, very hard packed snow.

So my old assumption that if the resort runs were shown as open on the ski reports meant the snow level on the whole mountain was down to 700m was incorrect. In fact during my trip the true snow level was at about 1300m.

You "Live and Learn", as we say in the UK!

And this does show my lack of experience in the mountains, which I only "found" in Autumn 2004. Both the last two winters in Bavaria have seen deep valley snow during all my visits, so I hadn't come across this situation before.