Skiing Returns to the Alps — For Now

For the first time in six weeks, the scrape of edges on snow can be heard again in the Alps. Italy's Passo Stelvio, perched above 2,700 metres on the border of Lombardy and South Tyrol, reopened its lifts this weekend after a cold snap finally allowed its glacier surface to refreeze overnight — a basic condition for safe skiing that summer heat had denied it for most of August.

It is a modest return. The Trincerone–Livrio cable cars are running from 6:30am to 4pm, but the Pajer and Cristallo ski lifts will operate only until midday, before the afternoon sun softens the snowpack again. Skiable terrain is thin, too: resort figures put the base at just 40cm. Managers say they intend to keep the area running through to their planned season close on 1 November, but stress that day-to-day conditions will decide whether that holds.

The reopening matters beyond one Italian pass. Stelvio's lifts had been the last outdoor, lift-served glacier skiing operating anywhere in the Alps — and, by extension, anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. Its closure on 15 August, after prolonged heat pushed freezing levels far above the ice, briefly left the region without a single functioning summer ski area for the first time in living memory. Switzerland's Saas-Fee and Zermatt had already gone dark earlier in August, and both remain closed.

A summer with no summer skiing

Glacier skiing has always been a niche pursuit, prized mainly by racing squads doing early-season training and hardcore enthusiasts chasing turns in July. But this year's near-total wipeout was different in kind, not just degree. Saas-Fee shut on 10 August, citing a freezing level sitting near 5,000 metres — roughly the height of Mont Blanc — while valley towns baked at 30°C. Stelvio's operator described the decision to close as painful but unavoidable, pointing to weeks of adverse conditions that made it impossible to guarantee the safety standards summer skiing requires.

The underlying problem is straightforward physics: glacier ski areas depend on cold nights. A hard overnight freeze gives the surface enough structure to hold groomed runs through the following day. When night-time temperatures stay above freezing, as they increasingly have, the snowpack never resets, and bare, unstable ice is left exposed. Researchers who track the Alps say glaciers are now losing mass at roughly double their historical rate, and the zero-degree isotherm — the altitude line above which everything sits below freezing — spent stretches of July sitting more than a thousand metres higher than is typical.

Italy's Aosta Valley, home to some of the region's most closely monitored glaciers, is on course for its worst year of ice loss on record, according to regional glaciologists, even before the summer season is fully over. Austria's Alpine Club has reported similar retreat across the roughly 100 glaciers it surveys nationally, with many tongues fracturing rather than simply thinning. Climate scientists attribute the pattern squarely to human-caused warming; the World Meteorological Organization has noted that Europe has warmed by around two degrees since the continent's landmark 1976 heatwave, a pace faster than almost anywhere else on the planet.

An accelerating trend

None of this is entirely new. Researchers who study the industry had already flagged 2022 — the last time a comparably brutal heatwave hit the Alps — as a possible "deathblow" moment for glacier summer skiing, noting a steep decline in operating days across the region even before this year's events. What 2026 added was completeness: for a period in mid-August, the closures didn't just shorten seasons, they eliminated them, however briefly. Even Austria's Hintertux Glacier, long marketed as a rare year-round ski destination that operated 365 days a year, has seen its uninterrupted season broken since 2022; this year it stopped skiing entirely in July and isn't expected to reopen until late September.

The rebound, when it comes, tends to be partial and cautious rather than a return to normal. Stelvio's restricted hours are themselves an adaptation — protecting the glacier from the same afternoon warmth that shut it down in the first place. Further into autumn, more of the Alps' glacier ski areas are due to stir back to life: Italy's Val Senales is expected to open for its 2026–27 season within a fortnight, and four Austrian resorts — Hintertux, Sölden, Kaunertal and Pitztal — are all aiming to start before the end of September, conditions permitting.

For now, that qualifier — conditions permitting — has become the defining phrase of Alpine summer skiing. An activity once sold on its reliability, a guaranteed patch of winter available even in the height of a European summer, is increasingly at the mercy of the same warming that is reshaping the mountains it depends on.