It's been a bit like the end of a ski season here in Verbier, Switzerland, the past couple of weeks.  The resort slowly empties, bars have their closing parties, shops shut with less and less people are around.

The only thing that springs into life is the building trade. 

Every chalet seems to be having some work done and the construction sites have become hives of activity as work needs to get finished before the first snowfalls. They have lain dormant recently but not any more.

Here in Verbier building work is banned in August but now the workers, mostly Portugese, are making up for it with a vengeance.

The roads too are being dug up/re-surfaced and people's thoughts are most definitely turning to winter.

Summer has been a busy time though out here.  We've had the Tour de France pas through, huge music festivals down by Lake Geneva including the Montreux Jazz Festival and The Paleo Festival and a host of different events.  If you think the mountains are quiet in the summer, then think again.

Few English seem to come here for their summer holidays but the Swiss do and many other nationalities too.

Why so few English?  It's a question I often ask myself as the mountains are fabulous in the summer months, in many ways much better than the winter, but it is just not really in the English holiday mentality.  We seem to prefer beaches.

So what are people's thoughts about next winter?

For those in the ski industry worry and fear seem to be the main states of mind.

Worry about the economy and a fear that even if people do come skiing and snowboarding they will try to spend as little money as possible.  The British market fell by 15-20% last winter across the Alps and if that happens again it will be little short of disasterous.

The problem for the ski industry is that it does business in a small part of the year and most of that is concentrated into a few short holidays weeks.

It is not a great business model, quite frankly, and especially when the market is crashing.

Some businesses I have spoken to say they will probably go under if things don't pick up and fear most definitely stalks the corridors.

To add to the sense of doom it is highly unlikely, if not totally impossible, that we will see the levels of snow we had last winter.  They were quite simply the best for decades and will not be repeated.

I hope I'm wrong but it's very unlikely.

However I am not personally pessimistic about next winter.  The ski industry has been through problematic times before and flourished, a reality check in terms of the prices that have evolved is no bad thing and the economic outlook appears to be improving.

We've just put up a series of pictures in the Photos of the Week  on the home page that we took last November in Andorra, France, Austria and Switzerland.

It's made me feel rather optimistic.  Winter approaches.

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