Somewhat late we got snow starting to fall on boxing day here in Leysin, by the 27th Dec that was starting to get to a reasonable amount. By way of a comparison, here’s a couple of shots from a few days apart …
The snowfall caused some major problems over in France but rather less so around Switzerland, our guests had travel plans that avoided the busiest times so it all went off without any incident from our perspective. Needless to say following the chaos on the French roads there’s been a lot of armchair expert comment regarding winter tyres. No doubt had all the cars enroute to the alps had winter tyres the problems would have been much reduced but it’s a stretch, to put it mildly, to conclude it ought to be compulsory. If nothing else it’s quite clearly totally unreasonable to expect people to have winter tyres for a couple of days per year on the off-chance there might be snow for a few kilometer of a 1000 kilometer journey. The best advice remains to have some snow chains with the expectation that you may need them for a few km at the end of your journey while the majority of your route should really be cleared down to the tarmac, if that’s not happening then you probably want to stop and wait for it to clear. Around here, leave the car in the valley and take the train up.
