I went to the exclusive Durham Pennine Ski resort on Saturday (Weardale) It's not exactly the Alps but it was still great fun. There was so much snow - probably close to as good as it gets for England although there were some ice patches but also nice powdered parts in places. 2 lifts and a suprisingly long run if you go from top to bottom and a mixture of gentle fun runs and some pretty adventurous stuff and plenty of people trecking off for 'off piste' runs and digging little kickers for jumps.

It was a proper 'mini adventure' getting there and a shovel and snow chains were required just to get there and park (we needed to dig at least 2 feet of snow away to make a parking space!) but it was a small price to pay for being able to snowboard only 1.5 hours away from Tynemouth

Also probably more interesting is a nice flat section before the first lift that was being used all day by up to 6 kiters on a mixture of foils and inflatables, ski's and snowboards. Some were also traversing all the way to the top of the slope at a really good pace and then ploughing all the way down again in areas less accessible by snowboarders / skiers. I would be well tempted to give this a go next time the snow is good.

I would definitely recommend it when conditions are good.

Here was a picture taken from the half way up:

anyone planning on going up this weekend?

I'm off to Glenshee this weekend but it looks like Weardale could be good again given the dumping we are having at the moment - a good 5" outside work at the moment.

You should try and get a group of you that way it's easier to dig your car parking spot etc. You should take a shovel and if not a 4x4 definitely worth splitting the costs and taking some snow chains (Halfords sell them for ~ £50 or some as cheap as £30 on EBay). We had to put them on at the bottom of the single lane track to get up the hill.