Most winters I will be checking the weather at least 3 or 4 times each morning. Normally it is the first thing I do as I wake up. Roll over, kill the alarm, activate the WiFi and have a quick look to see if anything has changed while I was asleep. Drive to work picking up the bread and Lilly make a coffee and check the weather again. Do the emails, confirm any new bookings, chat to Victor about what went on the night before, check the boilers, check the weather. Vania normally comes in about 9ish so there will be one last check before I go out skiing which can be any time from 09:15 if there is powder or 10:45 if it is a piste day. This year with the stupidity with the season passes I’m still going out but now it is a mixture between skiing, biking and ski touring. All of which to a greater or lesser extent need a weather report.
If the year is going well or we are in the middle of a bit of a storm most of the afternoon will be spent checking out satellite images and barometric forecasts. I’m not as much of a geek or obsessive as it sounds in my group of friends I am one of the more dissinterested skiers. The polak will regularly check the forecasts while on chair lifts some even go as far as to install weather rock systems in their houses.
So who to listen to well for the truly obsessive there are 3 main options:-
Snow-forecast.com I have been using these guys for years, I even used to advertise with them in the past, nice layout easy to understand always wrong. They tend to underestimate the snow falls massively or over estimate. Either way they tend to get it wrong! However they do always predict precipitation correctly and have very good live weather maps that are great for checking out pressure and cloud patterns. I have probably spent more time looking at their site than any other!
J2Ski.com Always right! A rubbish site impossible to easily understand and hard to navigate I don’t like it at all but and this is a pretty big but, they are normally right!
Accuweather.com Lovely layout and easy to navigate and understand. I love their totally outrageous attempt at a monthly forecast, shameless! Historical data charts are fun and again easy to understand. Normally their predictions are not too far off the mark.
WOM Word of mouth is the best sort of weather report of you are going on holiday and there are a few sources for Bansko that really add to the comedy value. Lance from The Bansko Blog adds a certain something to the mix with his live web based reviews of conditions now reporting for the bansko blog from piste No5 in Bansko right now….. lovely guy, slightly manic! Snow-Forecast.com has an Eyeball reporter service that publishes reports from locals in each resort supposedly saying it how it is. Most resorts have a PR team and website constantly updating live info on conditions.
As I have mentioned in a previous posts a lot of the people who are giving you wom info about any resort are not all that impartial, ski pass bookings, apartment rentals and the need to encourage guests onto the hill are all pressures that come to bear on the integrity of any reporter. I have even noticed a trend on one of the websites mentioned above for them to fluff up their reports at key moments.
So what to do? Do we believe our man on the ground reporting to you live from Bansko? Do we believe any of the sites? The answer is a big fat NO, but like some sort of drug crazed lab rat back we must go and check through each site again and again. In the words of Alexander Dumas we can only wait and hope!
