Snow report from Sunday 10th Jan

The Weardale Ski Club Ltd

Another busy day on the slopes today with scores of people attending and enjoying some excellent snow despite a bitterley cold northeasterly wind. Unfortunately we had to close early around 2pm due to reports of drifting snow affecting the access road. Everyone seemed to take this news well and soon realised why we made the decision as the snow was very deep in places and it took 2 hours or more to get the cars off. I was pleased to see that the vast majority had 4WD or chains but have to report several more broken chains that caused problems. I suspect that these are the cheap chains bought from Halfords (or similar) which are really not suitable for these roads and conditions and are designed mainly to help people off their housing estates onto the main road (though I may be mistaken as I did not witness the casualties - I was stuck at the back clearing the fell!). I gather there was also a red van stuck with chains that were described to me as more like a hairnet and again these are not really designed for these conditions. Fortunately, and with great debt of thanks to Martin English who came to the rescue in his tractor and snowplough, everyone got off the slopes albeit rather later than expected.

Membership The club is now closed to new members and we are also no longer accepting day members, at least for the foreseeable future, and if we relax this rule I will email it out on one of these mailings. The club has always had an upper limit of 700 members and due to the huge demand we have exceeded that number hence the reason to close - the carpark, road and lifts simply cannot cope with any more and struggles at weekends with these numbers.

Skiing this week We are not opening tomorrow (Monday 11th) due to the road conditions, predicted snow overnight and strong winds again forecast tomorrow. We will try and open later in the week if conditions improve - please use the answerphone - 01388 527527.

Lost Property I have reports of a lost mobile phone and also some snow chains. If anyone has found these please let me know and I will contact the owners.

The Club This is run by a very small group of volunteers who have to man the kiosk, piste the runs, fix the breakages, try and organise the queues and any other problems that occur. Most of you have been very supportive and this is appreciated, and some have offered to help out. This is difficult for most of the jobs which require training for safety issues but if anyone is interested in joining us on a more formal basis then please contact me. Training can be offered to those who are keen to help out. You may find tow operators "jumping the queue" at times - this may be because they are off to fix something or simply so that they can get a couple of runs in if they are lucky enough to do so so please bear with them!

Ski Sunday and the Journal I gather we featured briefly on Ski Sunday today - hopefully it will be replayed so I can watch it. We also had a nice 2 page article in the Journal with some great photos from James Cummings. I believe we are also to feature in the Observer possibly this weekend or next - typical we get all this publicity when we least need it!

Steve