Stelvio Pass Glacier Halts Summer Skiing as Alps' Final Holdout Succumbs to Heat

For decades, the glacier ski area at the Stelvio Pass has been a fixture of the European summer ski calendar — a place where national ski teams trained under the Ortler massif and recreational skiers chased snow in the height of the Alpine summer. As of this weekend, that tradition has, at least for now, come to an end. It was the last operating summer ski area with lifts left anywhere in the Alps.

The announcement

Unusually high temperatures have been battering the glacier ski area at the Stelvio Pass, and as of Saturday, August 15, summer skiing on the glacier has been suspended until further notice — though the cable cars themselves remain running. The operating company, Sifas (Società Impianti Funiviari allo Stelvio), informed operators and guests of the ski area of the decision on Saturday.

The cause lies in the persistently high temperatures of recent days: heat waves are making themselves felt even at high altitude, and the snowpack is barely cooling and freezing overnight anymore. Frequent thunderstorms have further degraded the state of the glacier. In its official statement, Sifas described the decision as "painful, but necessary."

Why it matters: safety, not just conditions

Under these conditions, Sifas said the usual quality and, above all, safety standards for summer skiing could no longer be guaranteed — which is why ski operations on the glacier were suspended from Saturday, August 15, until further notice. Visitors can still reach the glacier at the Stelvio Pass, however: the cable cars continue running and allow access up to the glacier itself, just without prepared runs to ski on.

Operators say they are now closely monitoring how the situation develops. A resumption of ski operations is possible once temperatures fall and the state of the glacier improves, and an update on a possible reopening is expected to follow shortly. As the report on Südtirol News noted, the unusually early end to summer skiing is another sign of just how much high temperatures and changing conditions are reshaping the Alps.

The last one standing

What makes the Stelvio closure notable is not that a glacier ski area shut for a few days — that has become almost routine in recent Alpine summers — but that it was the last one still running lifts at all. The Stelvio Pass was the final glacier area still offering summer skiing, after other glaciers had already shortened or temporarily suspended their seasons. Austria's Hintertux Glacier has introduced summer pauses in recent years, France's Tignes ended its summer season early this year due to poor snow conditions, and interruptions also hit the areas above Zermatt and Saas-Fee in Switzerland this summer. Summer skiing was once possible at numerous locations across the Alps; now only a handful of areas remain, many of them open for shorter periods or forced to pause mid-summer.

Zermatt's own shutdown set the tone

The most high-profile casualty came two weeks earlier, when Switzerland's flagship summer ski destination went dark at the height of its own national holiday. Zermatt closed its summer ski area on August 1 — Switzerland's national day — with the pistes above the Matterhorn resort shut to both guests and ski teams. Officials cited high temperatures, noting that even on the Klein Matterhorn, above 3,800 metres, nighttime lows were sitting well above freezing. The closure of the Theodul Glacier ski area was driven specifically by meltwater undermining the stability of the lift masts on the Plateau Rosa, forcing national ski teams — including reigning double Olympic champion Federica Brignone — to scramble for training space in nearby Saas-Fee, itself already stretched to capacity.

Walter Reusser, co-CEO of Swiss-Ski, told the Walliser Bote that the situation echoed the summer of 2022, when Zermatt was forced to suspend operations for similar reasons — while Martin Hug, CEO of Zermatt Bergbahnen, stressed that guest and staff safety remained the top priority, and that operations would be responsibly adapted to natural conditions whenever those standards could no longer be met.

A shrinking window, glacier by glacier

Switzerland's glaciers have been retreating far faster than researchers believed possible only a few years ago — in 2022 alone, they lost more than 6% of their ice volume according to the Swiss glacier monitoring network Glamos, and 2026 is on pace to at least match that figure. As centuries-old water reserves locked in glacial ice disappear, federal climate scenarios warn the canton of Valais could face water-supply strains in dry summers by mid-century, with new reservoirs seen as one possible way to ease the looming competition between hydropower, wildfire response, agriculture and tourism. Set against that backdrop, a shuttered summer ski slope reads as a relatively minor inconvenience.

Even before this latest round of closures, only around six ski areas in the Alps were open at all this summer, with just Austria's Hintertux Glacier and Switzerland's Matterhorn Glacier Paradise able to offer something close to continuous, weather-permitting operation across spring, summer, autumn and winter.

What's next

For now, the Stelvio Pass remains accessible to visitors — the road and cable cars are open, the glacier is still there to look at — but the skis stay racked. Whether the runs reopen before the traditional autumn shutdown depends on a cooling trend that has, this summer, been in short supply. For an activity once available at dozens of Alpine glaciers, summer skiing in 2026 has been reduced, county by county, to a shrinking handful of exceptions — and this week, even the most reliable of those exceptions ran out of cold.