Europe’s high-altitude year-round ski season has turned to slush

Summer skiing has been a fixture on Europe’s high Alpine glaciers for decades, but enthusiasts fear this year’s unprecedented heat could cause operators to switch off the lifts in the warmer months for good. A handful of high-altitude resorts such as Zermatt and Saas-Fee in Switzerland, Tignes and Les 2 Alpes in France and Passo Stelvio on the Swiss-Italian border still champion skiing on their high-altitude slopes for at least part of each summer. But as human-driven climate change fueled successive Northern Hemisphere heat waves from May to August, high temperatures and a lack of overnight freezing in the Alps exacerbated the summer melting of glaciers and forced operators to pull the plug on skiing for safety reasons. The shutdown marked the first time in years that organized, lift-access skiing has not been available anywhere in the Alps during the entire summer season. “It’s quite sad,” says Simon Wells, a Zermatt-based instructor with PDS Snowsport. “It takes away the opportunity for the kids’ teams, the local teams to train.” Zermatt aims to offer skiing 365 days a year and in a normal summer from May to late October, the resort operates 13 miles (21 kilometers) of groomed runs plus a snow park on the Theodul Glacier near the border with Italy. It is accessed via the cable car to the summit of the Klein Matterhorn, which at 12,739 feet (3,883 meters) is the highest lift station in Europe. On exit, the drag lift to Gobba di Rollin at 12,791 feet reaches higher still. The lifts for skiing typically run from early morning until about midday in summer. “It’s absolutely stunning, you’re on top of the Alps at dawn with the sun coming up around you,” adds Wells. “You can see the valley below with all the pastureland and greenery and you’re on top of Europe on this white-sheeted glacier. It’s just magical.” Typical ski visitors are local and international race and freestyle ski and snowboard squads training for the upcoming season, alongside the pedestrians who ride the cable car for sweeping views of the celebrated Matterhorn at 14,692 feet, the high Alpine glaciers and other 13,000-feet giants of the Alps. Then there are the keen local skiers and a significant number of summer vacationers from “all four corners of the globe” who want to experience skiing for the first time, according to Wells. “By about lunchtime, it’s time to finish. The conditions do melt and become very soft,” he adds. “By then everyone wants to head down and sunbathe or swim in the lakes or play golf or whatever.” Very visual changes This year, however, Zermatt announced a temporary suspension of its ski operation on August 1, citing “persistently high temperatures, the lack of a night-time cool-down, repeated thunderstorms and the changed snow and glacier conditions.” The closure marked only the second time — alongside the summer of 2022 — when operators had to stop the lifts for safety reasons. “The safety of guests and staff is always our top priority,” said Martin Hug, CEO of lift operator Zermatt Bergbahnen in a statement. The only exception was the Swiss ski team which had special dispensation to keep training. Wells says he has seen some “very visual changes” in 38 years of being involved in snow sports, notably the shrinking glaciers. This year, it has been the “extremes” of weather, he added. “One moment there is loads of snow, then there is brutal, sustained heat,” he adds. “Whereas you always used to get freeze-thaw conditions at night, this summer it has not been there. It has changed the landscape: things that weren’t around a couple of years ago like big boulders and rocks coming through the glacier, more crevasses being exposed.” Nearby, Saas-Fee operates more than 12 miles of summer ski runs on its Fee Glacier but it halted operations on August 10 this year. The Passo Stelvio ski area near the 2026 Winter Olympics venue of Bormio in Italy normally operates from May to November with a similar distance of runs. But skiing on the Stelvio glacier was also suspended “until further notice” on August 15 because of “persistent heat waves recorded even at high altitudes” alongside “lack of nighttime cooling and refreezing of the snowpack,” according to a statement on the resort’s website. Operators described it as a “painful but necessary” decision made “unavoidable by the adverse weather conditions.” ‘More pedestrians, fewer skiiers’ With the closure on July 19 of Timberline in Oregon, the United States’ only remaining summer ski destination, this meant there was a time during the summer that there was no skiing available anywhere in the Northern Hemisphere. In Les 2 Alpes, skiing is possible for the public on the Mont de Lans glacier up to 3,600 meters until the end of May, while top athletes and ski teams can train until early July. Before 2023, it was possible to ski until late August but the hot summer of 2022 forced a change in policy and shifted the program earlier for safety reasons and to preserve the glacier. The village of Hintertux operates the longest ski season in Austria but in recent years this has begun to shorten. “For several years now, there has been a scheduled pause in ski operations during the summer months,” a spokesperson for the resort said. “In summer, our primary guests are hikers, families and day visitors, and the mountain’s offerings are designed with this in mind. Ski operations will resume in early autumn, depending on weather conditions.” The Grande Motte Glacier high above Tignes in France’s Tarentaise valley offered summer skiing from June 20 to July 20 this year, attracting a host of international ski teams training for moguls and cross-country skiing on a purpose-built 12-mile track. “In the first part of the summer the skiing was very good in Tignes, the conditions were great,” says Clement Colin, director of resources for ALTTA, the newly formed ski lift and mountain management company for Tignes. “But then with the heat we had this year, it started to be more difficult.” In days gone by, Tignes marketed itself with the slogan, “365 days of skiing a year,” but the number of days that skiing is available has dropped “progressively” over the past couple of decades, according to Colin. “Summer skiing was popular in the past, but it has been slower these last few years,” adds Colin. “We have more pedestrians and fewer skiers in the summer.” Since 1850, Alpine glaciers have lost 30-40% of their surface area and about half their volume because of warming temperatures, according to the Chamonix-based Research Center for Alpine Ecosystems (CREA Mont-Blanc). Recent acceleration has been significant. Between 2000 and 2023, glaciers in Central Europe — the Alps and Pyrenees — have lost about 39% of their ice, according to a study by the Glacier Mass Balance Intercomparison Exercise (GlaMBIE) published in the journal Nature. Colin is witnessing the effect in Tignes. “The glacier is losing 3-4 meters’ ice thickness every year and it’s going faster and faster. The surface is shrinking,” he says. “The slopes are more and more difficult to keep in good shape. When the ice melts, you have a lot of rocks that emerge. Even in the winter, we have less snow that falls on the glacier so it does not regenerate. We know that in 10-15 years it will disappear. It’s very hard to see.” ‘It’s the timing that is worrying’ Switzerland’s glaciers, which number close to 1,400, lost 3% of their total volume in 2025 — the fourth-largest annual drop on record — according to a report by Swiss glacier monitoring group GLAMOS and the Swiss Academy of Sciences. Over the last decade, Switzerland has lost one quarter of its glacial ice, the report added. Glaciologist Matthias Huss, writing on X, said Swiss glaciers reached the point where all snow reserves accumulated from the winter are used up — known as Glacier Loss Day — on the second earliest date in history this year (June 29), second only to the record-breaking hot summer of 2022. In an earlier post in June, Huss showed a time-lapse of the Alps’ biggest glacier, the Aletschgletscher in Switzerland’s Bernese Oberland, going from snow-covered to bare ice. “Not absolutely exceptional,” he wrote. “It’s the timing that is worrying. This should occur 1-2 months later in the season.” For Colin, the changing conditions in the mountains and a growing recognition that seasons are shifting means operators and visitors might need to recalibrate their ski calendars. “Today we guarantee we can open on November 20 but that may be more difficult in years to come,” he says. “People have to consider we often now have better snow in March and April than in January. “Summer skiing we know will go more at the end of the winter season so May and June and no more in July and August. “It’s a mindset that is changing but it has to be faster.” He insists he is “not too worried” about the main ski season. “Tignes and Val d’Isère are some of the highest resorts in the Alps and we have some studies that show that in the next 50, 80, 100 years, we will have snowfall and cold periods to produce artificial snow,” he says. “So we know we have a future for skiing even if the glacier is more difficult.” The key for the summer is to “adapt our products” he says, promoting other activities available such as hiking and mountain biking and perhaps encouraging cyclists and pedestrians to visit the glaciers to see the impact of a changing climate. “Maybe we can help people to see what happens if we continue like this in global warming,” he says. Wells is trying to remain philosophical. “We consider the mountains to be alive and dictate to us what we’re going to do,” he says. “Even in winter, the mountain will decide. As far as when we can open the glacier again, it’s down to the mountain and the weather. We need consistent low temperatures and we need some snow. I’m staying as positive as possible.”