Help & how it works

Snowdesk brings together official avalanche bulletins from three providers — SLF (Switzerland), ALBINA (Austria/EUREGIO), and Météo-France — onto a single interactive map, with a consistent layout for every region and every day.

You don't need an account to browse: pick a region on the map, read today's danger rating and avalanche problems, or scrub back through the season to see how conditions have evolved. Signing in adds the things you save: pinned places and regions, uploaded routes, and map areas downloaded to read offline.

Every bulletin carries a danger rating on the five-level European scale — Low, Moderate, Considerable, High and Very High. The number and its colour are the headline: they say how likely avalanches are and how serious they would be, for the region as a whole.

The panel below the header breaks the day into windows. Most days have a single, unlabelled row: that rating holds all day and there is nothing more to say. When a provider expects conditions to change — a storm arriving, or the sun working on the snow — a second row appears with its own rating and a "Later" tag, as above. Only a window that departs from the baseline is tagged, so a tag on the panel always means the day is going somewhere.

Some providers split a window by height instead, giving one rating above a pivot elevation and another below it. Those rows carry a small mountain glyph shaded to show which half of the mountain they describe.

For a full walkthrough of the scale and its subdivisions, see the dedicated guide: How to read a bulletin.

The danger rating says how dangerous the day is. The avalanche problems say why, and where. Each one is a card like the example above, and a bulletin usually carries one to three of them.

The icon and title name the problem — fresh wind slab, a persistent weak layer buried in the snowpack, wet snow, gliding snow, new snow or cornices. Each behaves differently and asks for a different response, which is why the bulletin names them rather than giving you a number alone.

Below the title, the compass rose and the elevation glyph say where the problem lives: which slope aspects it has formed on, and above or below which height. A problem on north-through-south-east aspects above 2200 metres is not a problem on a sunny south-west slope at the valley floor, and the card is telling you where to expect it.

The comment underneath is the forecaster's own words, shown as they wrote them. It is the part that says what will release the problem and how it will behave, and it is worth reading in full — Snowdesk never summarises it away.

For what each problem type means in the snowpack, and how to read the cards in detail, see: How to read a bulletin.

Every bulletin page has a "Season" button in its header, marked with the season's years. It opens a heatmap of the whole season for that region: one tile per day from the season's start through to tomorrow, laid out as weeks running down the columns.

Each tile carries that day's danger rating in its colour, so a season's worth of conditions reads at a glance — the settled spells, and the weeks that ran high. A day whose rating varied across the region is split diagonally between the lowest and the highest it reached.

Tap any day that has a bulletin to jump straight to it. Days with no bulletin — before the season began, or a gap in what the provider published — are drawn flat and do nothing.

Resort and saved-pin pages carry the day's weather: a condition icon and label, the high and low temperature, any new snow, the freezing level, wind, and when the sun rises and sets. It comes from Open-Meteo and describes one place. A bulletin covers a whole region rather than a place, so it carries no Open-Meteo reading — its weather is the forecaster's own description, further down the bulletin page under "Snowpack & Weather".

A resort page shows one block per place we hold for it — typically the village, a mid-mountain station and the top — each labelled with its height. That is the point of showing more than one: rain in the village and snow on the summit are the same forecast read at two altitudes, and the difference is usually what decides the day.

Each of those places links to its own forecast page, and that is where the week lives: one column per day with its icon, temperatures, wind and freezing level. The first few days also carry an hour-by-hour breakdown and the later ones do not, because the forecast is not published at that resolution that far out.

Past dates show no weather at all. We record what the forecast said on each day going forward, so there is nothing on file for days before we started keeping it. A bulletin page for last winter shows the bulletin and no weather panel, rather than guessing.

The icon takes its day or night form from the time you are reading at, matched against sunrise and sunset where the place actually is — so a page read at midday looks like daytime whichever date you have navigated to.

The map colours every region by its avalanche danger level for the date being shown, from pale green (Low) through to red (Very High). Tap a region to select it: its name and that day's rating appear in the header above the map, along with a link to the full bulletin.

The magnifier searches regions and resorts by name and jumps straight to one. The crosshair centres the map on where you are, if you let your browser share your position.

The buttons down the right-hand side are the map's controls: layers, bulletin shading strength, offline downloads, your favourites, your field observations and your routes. The chevron at the foot folds them away when you want a clear map, and the "?" above it replays a short tour that names every one of them.

The (i) button in the bottom-left corner opens the legend: the danger scale, what each kind of pin means, the slope-angle bands when that layer is on, and the attribution for the map and the avalanche data.

Your saved favourite pins can be drawn on the map alongside the resorts layer — see "Favourites" below.

A community-reports overlay shows anonymised, publicly-shared field observations from other Snowdesk users on the map.

The field-observations button lets you submit conditions you have seen in person — see "Field observations" below.

The scrubber along the bottom of the map moves it through the season, a day at a time. Drag the thumb, and every region's colour changes to its danger rating for the date you land on.

The buttons either side of the track work like a media player: skip to the start or the end of the season, or play the whole thing as a timelapse, forwards or backwards. A second press stops it.

The date sits in a pill above the track, and everything else on the map follows it — the danger colours, the region readout in the header, and the weather symbols when that layer is on.

The weather layer is the one thing that does not follow the whole season. It is a forecast, so it covers today and the week ahead: scrub back past today and the symbols go, while the danger colours stay.

The stacked-squares button on the right of the map opens the layers menu — one list controlling everything the map draws, grouped by what each row is. A row you switch on stays on the next time you open Snowdesk on this device.

Places

Resorts draws a pin at every ski resort Snowdesk knows about. Tapping one opens a short popup — the resort's name, the region it sits in, a link to that region's bulletin, and a star to save it to your favourites.

Favourites draws your own saved places, and Routes draws every track you have uploaded. Both need an account: tapping one while you are signed out offers you the way in rather than switching on a layer with nothing in it.

Conditions

One row per bulletin provider — SLF (CH), Météo-France (FR) and ALBINA (AT, IT) — each covering the countries that provider publishes for. Switching one off takes its bulletins off the map, which is the way to look at one country's picture on its own. Switzerland is on to start with.

How strongly the danger colour paints is a separate control: the half-filled square below the layers button steps the shading from off to full, so you can read the terrain underneath without losing the bulletin altogether.

Weather draws a condition symbol and the day's high temperature at every place Snowdesk holds, with the height that reading is for beneath it. It follows the timeline like everything else on the map, and it has rules of its own worth knowing about — read "Weather on the map" below.

Field observations draws what other people have reported from the ground, fading as each report ages. It is public, so it works whether or not you are signed in.

Boundaries

Outlines of the European avalanche regions at three scales: Major (EAWS Level 1), Minor (EAWS L2) and Micro (EAWS L4). Micro is the level bulletins are issued at and is drawn by default; the two coarser outlines help you place a small region inside the wider area it belongs to. They follow the base map rather than the Bulletins rows: on a national base map you see that country's regions, and on OpenFreeMap you see all of them.

Basemap

The map underneath everything else, and the only section where you pick one rather than switching several on. OpenFreeMap covers the whole area; the national mapping-agency maps — Swisstopo (CH), IGN (FR) and basemap.at (AT) — carry far more detail for their own country and are blank outside it, so switching to one is a choice to look closely at one place.

Two things are drawn on top of whichever one you chose, which is why they sit under this heading. "Display slope angles" shades the ground by steepness — the one layer with real limits on what it can tell you, so read "Slope angle" below before you rely on a shading.

"Display downloaded areas" shades the ground you already hold on this device, so you can see the edges of your own coverage before you set off. Left alone it switches itself on whenever you are offline, which is when the answer matters.

The dot on each row

Most rows carry a small dot saying whether that layer is held on this device: green for available offline, grey for not stored yet, and a pulse while it is being fetched. Green means the data is on the device right now, checked rather than assumed, so you can see what will still work before you lose signal. Two rows have no dot, because neither could answer honestly: slope angles come from someone else's map server, and your downloaded areas are on this device by definition.

A row is sometimes switched off with a reason attached — the slope layer outside the area it covers, or any layer that has never been loaded while you were online. The note on the row says which.

Each heading opens and closes, and remembers which way you left it. The line under a heading says what is on inside it without you having to open it, and the count at the top of the menu says how many layers are on altogether.

The Weather row under "Conditions" in the layers menu puts a condition symbol on the map at every place Snowdesk holds — resort villages, mid-stations and summits, plus a point at the centre of each avalanche region. Under each symbol is the day's high temperature and the height that reading is for.

The height is there because the temperature means little without it. Two degrees at 1500 m and two degrees at 3000 m describe different weeks, and on a map that shows both at once the number alone would be misleading.

Zoomed out, places close together collapse to one symbol, and it is always the lowest of them. A valley reading is the one you can place, and its freezing level is what tells you whether it is raining where you would park. Zoom in and the higher stations separate out again.

The overlay is a forecast, so it covers today and the week ahead and nothing before that. Scrubbing the timeline back past today leaves the map with no weather symbols; scrubbing forward changes them without fetching anything, because the whole week arrives in one go.

Only curated places appear here. Your own saved pins are never added to this layer, even for you — their weather lives on the pin's own card, where nobody else can reach it.

Favourites let you pin specific spots — a resort, a trailhead, a favourite line — directly on the map. Sign in, open the star button on the right of the map, and use "Add a favourite": the map moves under a fixed pin, so you place it with one hand. You can also save a resort straight from its pin's popup.

That same panel lists everything you have saved. Rename a pin in place, remove one, and use the "Display on the map" switch at the foot to draw them all — the switch lives here rather than in the layers menu.

Every favourite also has its own page you can bookmark or share — open it from "My favourites" or from "Your favourites here" on that favourite's region bulletin page.

Favourites are private: they are yours alone and are never shown to other users. A pin dropped with no connection is saved on the device and sent when you are back online.

Field observations are quick, one-tap reports of what you have actually seen out on the snow. You pick one signal — whumpfing, shooting cracks, fractures, wind striations or pinwheels — and that, with where and when you saw it, is the whole report.

Sign in with a verified email address, then open the triangle button on the right of the map. The panel lists your own reports and offers "Report an observation". Whether the community's reports are drawn is the "Field observations" row in the layers menu, with every other layer.

The report takes your position from your device where it can, and you can nudge the pin before sending. If there is no GPS fix, move the map to set the spot yourself.

Unlike your pins and routes, reports are shared. They appear to other users on the community-reports overlay and on the Observations page — without your name, but with the place and time you recorded. Only report what you are content to make public.

A report made with no connection is held on your device and sent as soon as you have one, which is the point — the ground you are reporting on rarely has signal.

Routes are your own tracks, drawn on the map beside the avalanche picture. Sign in, open the routes button on the right of the map, and upload a .gpx file containing a track or a route — the kind of file a GPS watch, a planning tool or a touring app exports.

The file you exported is not always the file you want on the map. gpx.studio ↗ opens a .gpx in the browser and lets you crop its ends, slice it into pieces, join two together or redraw a stretch, then export the result — enough to take the drive home off a recorded track, or to cut a multi-day tour into a day each. It is free and needs no account.

The panel lists everything you have uploaded, each row with its distance and, where the file recorded them, its ascent, its descent and how long the recording ran. The button at the end of a row opens the things you can do with it — plan a trip, share it, rename it or remove it. The Routes row in the layers menu draws them all as lines.

Tapping a line on the map opens the route's own popup: its name, the same figures, and an elevation profile of the whole track. The profile is drawn from the heights in your file, so a track recorded without them shows none rather than a flat line. The time shown is elapsed — start to finish, including every stop — not moving time, and a file with no timestamps in it shows none.

Routes are private. They are visible only to you, they are never shown to other users, and they play no part in the community-reports overlay.

Nothing is published, but you can hand one route to someone else. The Share control on a route's row gives you a link to send them; whoever opens it sees that route drawn on their map with a Save button. They can open the link before they have signed in, and it will still be waiting once they have.

Saving takes a copy. Their copy is theirs to rename or remove and yours is untouched, so the two never affect each other afterwards. The link keeps working for anyone you send it to for a few weeks, and it stops working straight away if you remove the route it points at.

Uploading needs a connection, as do renaming and removing — those actions are not queued for later the way a field observation is. There is a limit on the size of a single file and on how many routes one account can keep; the panel says so when you reach either. A very long track is thinned before it is stored, which keeps it quick to draw and leaves its shape, distance and profile intact.

Once your routes have loaded on a device, the lines stay on the map with no connection. The list inside the panel needs one, and says so instead of pretending you have no routes.

Every trip has a meeting point: the spot the organiser dropped on the map when they planned it. Where we can, it is shown as a three word address — three words after a triple slash, like ///filled.count.soap. The words are not a name anyone chose. They identify one 3-metre square of ground anywhere in the world, so they say exactly what a pair of coordinates says, in something you can read down a phone.

To find the square, type the three words into what3words or into a map app that understands them. The organiser's page and the link they send you both show the same address, so everyone on a trip is looking at the same words.

When we have no address for a meeting point, the page shows its latitude and longitude instead — the same numbers it has always shown, ready to paste into a map app. The meeting point is never blank.

A download saves the background map for an area onto this device, so the map still draws where there is no signal. The framed-square button on the right of the map opens "Your downloads": everything you have stored, what it is costing you, and the way to add more.

There are two ways to store an area. Select a region on the map and use the download button beside its name in the header to take the whole region; or use "Download a custom area" inside the sheet, which lets you frame any part of the map yourself — the right choice for a tour that straddles a boundary. Each row in the sheet says which of the two it is, and custom areas can be renamed.

A budget at the top of the sheet caps how much space downloads may take, and you choose the figure. When a new download would take you past it, the oldest areas are removed to make room and you are asked first. Lowering the budget below what you already hold puts you over it, and the sheet says so rather than deleting anything behind your back.

Starting a download needs an account. The controls stay where they are when you are signed out and take you to the sign-in page instead; anything you have already downloaded keeps working exactly as before, signed in or not, because reading a stored map needs no connection and no account.

Your areas follow your account, but the map data does not. An area you save on a laptop is listed on your phone with a "Download here" button, and the space it takes is counted only on the device that actually holds it — so a listed area is not the same thing as an available one. The sheet dims the ones that are not on this device and shows no size for them.

The map data itself lives in this browser on this device. Clearing the site's data or resetting local data removes it, and the bin on a row removes that area yourself — from this device and from your account, so it goes from your other devices too.

"Display downloaded areas", under Basemap in the layers menu, shades the areas you hold, so you can see the edges of your own coverage before you set off. Left alone it switches itself on whenever you are offline, which is when the answer matters; set it either way and your choice stands.

An area is downloaded for the base map that was showing at the time. Switching to a different base map is switching to a map you have not stored, and the sheet offers to download the same area again for it. That is why the sheet groups what you hold under a heading per base map, each in that map's own colour, with what it is costing you beside it.

Downloading needs a connection; listing and removing what you already hold works offline, which is when space usually runs short. A download can also fail because the device is out of room or the area is larger than the budget allows — frame a smaller area and try again.

A download stores the map, not the avalanche bulletins. Bulletin pages and the danger colours are kept for offline use as you visit them — see "Install & offline" below.

Snowdesk accounts are passwordless by default: enter your email address and follow the link that's sent to you — no password to remember. You can optionally set a password, or register a passkey on your device, from the account setup page.

An account holds the things you save: the places and regions you pin, the routes you upload, the trips you plan, and the map areas you download to read offline. All of it is private to you, and everything except a field observation stays that way. Snowdesk sends no bulletin alerts — the only email it will send you is a sign-in link, a password reset, or a confirmation that you changed your address.

To hear about a new bulletin, subscribe a feed reader to the RSS feed for the country you follow: snowdesk.info/ch/feed.rss for Switzerland, and the same address with at, it or fr for Austria, Italy and France. The feeds need no account and list each bulletin as it is published.

Snowdesk can be installed as an app on your phone or computer. Look for an "Install" or "Add to Home Screen" option in your browser's address bar or share menu — once installed, it opens in its own window without any browser chrome.

Pages you have already visited load instantly on repeat visits, and keep working with no connection, because both the app and the data behind those pages are kept on your device. Snowdesk always asks the network first and only falls back to what it holds.

That means a rating you see offline is the last one this device fetched, not necessarily the one in force. The signal symbol at the top of every page tells you which it is: struck through whenever the connection is failing, or has failed often enough that Snowdesk has stopped trying and is serving stored data only. Tap it for how long ago this device last reached the server. Check that before you trust a rating, and reload once you have signal.

You can also stop Snowdesk using the network yourself. Tap the signal symbol at the top of any page and turn on "Offline mode" — before you lose coverage, or to spare a metered or roaming connection — and the app runs from what it has already stored. It stays on until you turn it off again: Snowdesk will not quietly reconnect. While it is on, that symbol is struck through, much like aeroplane mode on a phone, and the same menu tells you how old the stored data is and offers the way back.

The background map is the exception: it is stored only for the areas you download yourself — see "Offline downloads" above.

To see exactly what this device has saved — and to clear it if something is stuck — open Offline content. You do not need an account, and it is worth checking before a trip rather than after.

Tapping the signal symbol at the top of the page names one clock: when this device last reached the server. It also says which state you are in — requests are still being attempted and will update the page as soon as one lands, or Snowdesk has stopped calling the network and is serving stored data until you tap "Try reconnecting".

The Offline content page has a "Sync log" panel listing your device's most recent real syncs with the server (cached, offline-served pages don't count). It keeps the newest 100 entries.

"Reset local data" on the same page clears the sync log along with everything else cached on this device.