Skiing: Is this the best ski season ever? No one can remember anything that dramatic since 1999 - and then only in late February. A trawl through historical snowfall figures shows that in general across much of the Alps up to four times the average for mid-January has fallen. In most places, conditions for skiers over Christmas and New Year were nothing short of magnificent. January is skiing like a dream with all sorts of last-minute deals with discounts of up to 30 per cent currently available. The prospects for families over February half term look particularly promising. Guides to 50 top ski resorts However, the number of available holidays has dropped by as much as 30 per cent over the past three years. If you're planning on a peak season trip in February or over Easter you need to book now. So in terms of snowfall is this the best season ever? Well, let's not get too carried away because there's still around 75% of it - 15 weeks - to run before the last lifts close. So far it appears to be an epic season, on the same kind of groundbreaking scale that North America experienced last year. But in these increasingly strange climatic times almost anything could happen. Just remember that during the fourth week of last April in the French Alps it was hotter than the Med. People were opening their pools and playing golf in the mountains long before the last skiers left. The biggest snowfall of the first six months of the year didn't arrive until June. But realistically, even if it doesn't snow again between now and Easter and even if temperatures soar to last year's spring levels, high resorts such as Tignes and St Anton could now survive more than adequately on the cover they already have. So certainly I'll happily concede that overall, for all sorts of reasons, it's the best start to a European ski season in much more than a generation and one that has probably saved a whole chunk of the British ski industry from financial extinction. What makes it all the more remarkable is that this record snowfall was so utterly unexpected. Autumn across the Alps was both the driest and the mildest in 148 years. The Swiss reported that temperatures had not been as persistently high at altitude since November 1864. To put that in perspective, that's seven months before Sir Edward Whymper famously conquered The Matterhorn and the American Civil War was at its height. On the last day of November, I stood on the Grande Motte glacier above Tignes and looked towards Courchevel and the Northern Alps beyond. The landscape was relentless brown, not a snowflake in sight. At the time, whilst you hope against hope, it seemed inconceivable that such a fast turnaround in fortunes could take place. Val d'Isère had to cancel a World Cup race because of lack of snow. Two weeks later Courchevel had to cancel another because of too much snow. For a decade, the gloomiest global warmists have insisted that European skiing is in a terminal state and that the lower resorts will soon have no alternative but to shut up shop. The dramatic storms in early January seemed to make a mockery of this viewpoint. Avalanches severed rail and road links. Méribel was left without power. Zermatt, Lech, Zürs, Ischgl, Val d'Isère and Tignes were all briefly cut off from the outside world. But, again, a word of caution: the giant snowfalls have been accompanied by what the French call Le Yo-yo effect. Temperatures have dropped to -25C and then suddenly soared to as high as +12C over a 24-hour period. We've seen rain falling above 2000m and such unusually flakey weather patterns lend support to the warmists who predict that we will see more - not less precipitation - in the winters to come, but much of this will fall as rain at lower altitudes. But it is the right now, not even the medium-term future, that matters to tour operators who have been battered for so long by poor snow cover and a shrinking market. The number of skiers from Britain who annually take a ski holiday peaked at 1.4 million at the turn of the century, but by the end of last winter it had shrunk to barely 900,000. After three years of zero profit caused by the combination of economic gloom and unfavourable exchange rates, ski travel companies were at their most vulnerable. For an important handful of them, a second consecutive poor snow winter would have been the coup de grâce. I know of five companies in particular who were just hanging on to their businesses by their fingertips. One such operator confessed to me that in the first week of December he thought it was all over. We had clients going out the following week, there wasn't a flake to be seen and the phone had long since ceased to ring. The prospect of another financially disastrous winter meant that if I had any sense at all I should pack it in sooner rather than later - I nearly did. Then the snow started falling and at the eleventh hours the tills started singing. But full recovery is a long way off and, again, I urge a word of caution. Best season ever" needs some pretty careful definition. While France, Switzerland, and Austria can return some remarkable snowfall figures for December and for the first half of January, much of Italy has so far missed out. Only the Aosta Valley and Milky Way region close to the French frontier have caught the big powder. In contrast to neighbouring countries, conditions in the Dolomites are best described as adequate. Andorra has just average snow conditions of 10/50cm assisted as usual by artificial cover. Åre in Sweden has a good, but not spectacular 60cm mid-mountain. Bulgaria is also doing ok. What's important in France, Austria, and Switzerland is that the initial snowfalls were not accompanied by gale force winds and were followed by a brief period of thaw that brought rain to even the higher slopes. This allowed the snow to pack down safely with each layer adhering to the one below it so that avalanche risk was vastly reduced during the busy holiday period. However, all that has now changed. The violent snowstorms that shook the Alps last weekend were accompanied by hurricane force winds that pushed the avalanche risk up to 4/5 and even the ultimate of 5/5. In real terms this means not only that the weight of a single skier on a loaded slope can trigger a devastating slip, but that the avalanche can release naturally at any time without any human intervention. When this level is declared, resorts are forced to close all their lifts until pisteurs have blasted the dangerous slopes. The fact is that too much snow can be as damaging to a one-week holiday as too little. Best ever season? Not for me," said a friend returning from France last weekend, "I managed three days of very limited skiing in a white-out and the rest of the time the lifts were closed and high winds made it dangerous to step outside the door." According to Dr Rudi Mair, head of the Tirol's avalanche warning service, road links between the resorts - but not the resorts themselves - are under threat at the moment from avalanches. If the skies had not cleared this week, allowing ski patrols to use helicopters for blasting loaded slopes, the Tirol would have had a serious problem. It was staring at the same doomsday scenario it faced in February 1999 when whole holiday villages came under serious avalanche threat. In Galtür, near Ischgl, a wall of snow buried a hotel, killing 31 people. Under such extreme threat, each village has an avalanche committee that must take decisions on the partial evacution of their resort. What we don't want, at least for a while, is another prolonged spell of heavy snow and high winds across most of the Alps. Instead, we need the snowpack to settle, the sun to shine - and then, yes, quite possibly we can find ourselves enjoying the best Alpine ski season ever. The latest snow reports