A French ski resort has been accused of getting around heatwave conditions by transporting ’70 tonnes’ of snow by dumper trucks from elsewhere on a mountain range to their slopes.
Environmental groups claim camera traps set up to monitor wild animals like lynx and wolves in the Vosges Mountains in central eastern France recorded tipper lorries making ’11 trips’ to higher altitudes to gather snow to bring down to the resort in La Bresse in late December.
The resort owners have denied any wrongdoing claiming any snow brought to their location was done so by local trucks and supplemented by artifical sources.
However, French media site TFI info reports Fiona Mille, president of Mountain Wilderness, claimed her organisation’s cameras picked up the lorries.
She told the publication: “It’s an incredible situation. Moving lorries to ski on a strip of snow gives a very bad image of the mountains.”
Pictures taken from the resort at the end of December show sparse cover on the slopes with large piles of what is described as ‘stocked snow’, from earlier snowfalls in the winter, being used.
Green groups, Alsace Nature , Mountain Wilderness , SOS Massif des Vosges and Lorraine Nature Environment, issued a joint press release claiming a “dump truck” passed in front of a camera trap “several times” going up the mountain “empty” and “coming down filled with snow”.
It added: “A quick extrapolation shows that no less than 70 tonnes of snow will have been transported from one watershed to another. When the snow melts, that much water will be transported will not reach the Haut-Rhinois watershed. […] If the snow is res nullius (which is not owned by anyone), is it nevertheless legitimate for some to monopolise this resource for commercial purposes?”
France Bleu Sud Lorraine reports Nicolas Claudel, director of the La Bresse ski resort, denied the accusations made by the enviromental groups.
He said: “These snow transports which are singled out by the associations were not organised by the company La Bresse Labellemontagne neither directly nor sub-contracted.
“We occasionally resort to transporting snow to reinforce, in the ski area, the few places that need it. It is a very tiny part of our activity, and when we resort to this, we use the authorised roads to do so.”
