Germany's Biggest Alpine Resort Lacks Key Ingredient - Snow

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GARMISCH-PARTENKIRCHEN, Germany (Reuters) - Global warming is more than just a theory to Germany's most famous winter resort, where a worrisome shortage of snow in recent decades has forced the Alpine village to reinvent itself.

Garmisch-Partenkirchen gained worldwide fame as the venue for the 1936 winter Olympics, but the picturesque town of 27,000 has now become more reliant on summer tourism because rain falls more often than snow in winter. As the snow line retreats up mountains in the face of what many scientists believe to be the effects of global warming, Garmisch -- at an altitude of 700 metres (2,300 feet) -- is rarely covered in snow. Losing its "white gold" has alarmed the local populace.

The town, where 70 percent of economic output derives from tourism, has nevertheless tried hard to replace what nature has stopped giving by investing millions of euros in state-of-the-art snow-making equipment that blows man-made crystals onto the ski slopes and into the valleys. "Without the artificial snow we simply wouldn't be able to attract enough tourists here in the winter," said Thomas Schmid, mayor of Garmisch-Partenkirchen, a town that lies in an Alpine valley just north of the Austrian border.

EDIT

The United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) warned in a 2003 report that global temperatures were expected to rise due to global warming by up to three degrees Celsius in the next 50 years, raising the snow line and crippling the ski industry. The UNEP report said slopes above altitudes of 1,200 metres (3,940 feet) now considered viable ski areas would be at risk within 30 to 50 years, when skiers would have to trek up to altitudes of 1,500 to 1,800 metres (4,920 to 5,900 feet) for snow. Most of Garmisch's ski and snowboard slopes are between 750 and 2,000 metres (2,460 and 6,560 feet) -- among the highest in Germany. World Cup ski races at a lower Bavarian resort, Berchtesgaden, were cancelled in two of the last five years because of a lack of snow."

EDIT

http://www.reuters.co.uk/newsArticle.jhtml?type=worldNews&storyID=655834

[Squatch]

1. Ummmm....what do they call all this white stuff?

http://www.gapinfo.de/Dienste/Onlinecam/

That's not snow, is it?