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The tallest church spire in Salzburgerland was piercing a snowglobe of flakes as I arrived in Maria Alm, a perfect storybook of a ski resort. Singing townsfolk were teetering atop the whipped-cream drifts that covered roofs, shovelling metre after cubic metre from laden pitches.Â
Come morning, the lift board was speckled with red crosses indicating closed pistes, but the main Natrun gondola was nonetheless up and running to access the pistes. Higher up the mountain, lift operators were blowing, blasting and clearing yet more snow. Perhaps surprisingly in such a small resort, no effort or expense was being spared to ready the slopes, including using helicopters to airbrush snow from trees that were at risk of causing lift cables to collapse â a high-tech approach costing some â¬50,000 euros per day. Â