One of the questions people have been asking since the lockdown in March 2020 has been whether the 2020-21 ski season will happen at all?
For most of the year, as ski areas opened and operated for summer sports like mountain biking or summer glacier skiing without problems for six months the short answer was, we hoped, “Yes.”
By October, around 30 ski areas had already opened for Autumn skiing and snowboarding on high slopes and there were some great early snowfalls too.
But we had learned in March 2020, there was a small danger it could flick back to “No.” That’s exactly what happened in early November when second lockdowns began in countries across Europe. These, it was hoped, would allow for a ‘normal’ Christmas but by the start of December instead the leaders of France, Italy and Germany were announcing plans to keep their ski areas closed until January and urging other EU countries to do the same.
You can read about which have and which haven’t here.
In short, the world is divided between countries that fear the risk of opening ski areas causing the virus to spread is too much, and those that think the danger isn’t any worse than, say, a crowded suburban train or metro, probably much less in fact, and that it’s more important for people’s physical and mental health to get out in the open air of the mountains if they can.
Ski areas in Scandinavia, Scotland and North America were, at the start of December, in the latter camp, most in the Alps, except Switzerland, the former.
There are promising signs that the latter half of the season might be better with vaccines rolling out and (hopefully) declining infection rates.
Everything depended on the virus and where we are with fighting it. Having a vaccine will change things a lot.
In the meantime we have learned some key things through the pandemic so far.
- The severity of the virus and the national response to it differs from country to country.
- The further we get into the pandemic the more countries adopt ways of operating as normally as they can.
