Norwegian Summer Ski Centre Ends 2018 Season Three Months Early Due to Heat

Norway’s Galdhøpiggen summer ski area has closed early for the 2018 season.  The ski area, Norway’s highest, had been scheduled to stay open to early November.

“The sweltering spring and summer temperatures have been hard for the snow,” a ski area spokesperson said, adding, “We must therefore with heavy hearts close indefinitely.”

Galdhøpiggen is on Scandinavia’s highest mountain at 2469 metres and usually attracts international race teams for training.

The centre’s T bar lifts reaches 2,250m on the Veslejuv Glacier from a base of 1900 metres and accesses up to 1.5km of trails over a 350 metre vertical.

Norway has two other summer ski centres but one, Stryn, had already opened and closed for summer 2018 with a very short season of just a few weeks in length, again blaming the warm weather.

The third, Folgefonn or ‘Fonna’, is still open and reports a two metre base.

There is a hope that Galdhøpiggen will be able to re-open in the early autumn when temperatures drop,

“We have about 60000 cubic metres of snow stored under tarpaulins ready to use when it is cooler in the autumn,” the centre’s statement concluded.

Last summer a number of glacier ski areas in the Alps including Les 2 Alpes in France and Passo Stelvio in Italy ended their summer ski seasons early as their snow cover on their glaciers melted away leaving exposed ice but so far they are still open for 2018 after the heavy snowfall at the start of the year have their glaciers a deeper snowbase.