We arrived late because the road from Tomintoul was blocked by 3 cars that could not get up the snow covered road - we hadn't expected this as the Lecht website had earlier said the roads were fine, they were anything but. No one was offered any assistance from the Lecht staff in their tractor and we eventually freed the cars ourselves.

On arrival we hired our gear and were rather disappointed with the quality, the boots had certainly seen some hard times, were looking very ragged and didn't even lace up properly.

Once on the slopes we were further shocked, the snow condition report on their site that morning said:

"Main runs complete good cover of new snow, some icy patches. Ample areas for beginners.There is good snow cover across the whole ski area."

In reality, all of the green runs were solid sheet ice that you could not snowboard safely on. The blue runs were considerably more difficult and as we are relativly inexperienced they were beyond our skill level. There is no good learner snow here, the green runs have no gradient and are only a few tens of metres long before they flatten out completely. There are no intermediate runs for beginners.

Several other things that we were not impressed by:

* No obvious signposting of runs or routes and no one around to help you out.
* No maps of piste outside to let you work out where to go.
* Car park snow clearance poor - massive drifts in the car park and no help getting out, a group of us had to get together to help each other out of the car park.
* No information on road conditions posted anywhere and no staff who knew what was going on.

We will not be going here again, ever; I strongly recommend you do not either. In contrast, the next day (today), we went to Cairngorm mountain and had a fantastic day on some great snow with good pistes and friendly, helpful staff.

I hope this report prevents somebody else from wasting their time and money at the Lecht - go somewhere else instead!