Only US Summer-Only Ski Area Blames Lack of Snow For Not Opening in 2024
Beartooth Basin ski area, the only summer-only ski area in North America, has said it won’t open in 2024 due to lack of adequate snow cover this year.
The Beartooth Basin ski area on the Montana/Wyoming border has said it won’t open this spring due to lack of adequate snow cover this year.
The centre, one of seven on three continents in the northern hemisphere that don’t open in winter but do for various periods between spring and autumn/fall each year, has only operated for a few weeks for each of the past few seasons, sometimes due to too much snow blocking access, others due to mechanical issues with its lifts.
Established in the mid 1960 by Austrians Pepi Gramshammer, Eric Sailer and Anderl Molterer as the Red Lodge International Ski and Snowboard Camp, the centre is one of North America's oldest summer skiing areas. In a social media post on the decision, the centre explained,
“Beartooth Basin will be closed for the 2024 season due to a lack of snow. Here is to hoping to see you all up there next year!”
Although Beartooth Basin isn’t opening in 2024, the US currently has more centres open than any other country this month, with more than a dozen resorts still operating in Arizona, California, Colorado, Oregon, Utah and Vermont. Timberline in Oregon usually stays open into summer and is currently posting a snow deptrh of around 13 feet (4m).
However, north of the border, although Whistler Mountain and Banff’s Sunshine ski area still have a week to run of their 23-24 season, the long-running summer camps on Blackcomb Glacier have also been cancelled this year due to poor snow cover. Usually running in June and July, these too have had increasing issues in recent years, with some operators pulling out saying snow cover was getting worse and worse and public access also concluded several years ago, reserving the glacier to ‘campers’ only.
It's not yet clear if its closed for summer operations for good or if camps might return in 2025. One Camp organiser, Momentum, hopes so, issuing this statement,
“We regret to have to inform everyone that Whistler Blackcomb has made the difficult decision to suspend summer glacier operations for 2024. The much lower than normal snowpack this year means that the Showcase T-Bar up on the glacier is now not able to operate successfully. While we had remained optimistic that the additional heavy snowfall in late Feb and early March would continue, WB’s most recent assessment has unfortunately concluded that it will not be enough to operate as usual. We all know that our climate’s weather is becoming more unpredictable – in 2022 we enjoyed our biggest and best snow year on the glacier over our 32 year history and hope that 2025 will swing back to more normal levels, when we plan to run the camp again. Whistler Blackcomb will be using the summer months to improve the alpine lifts, which will further facilitate better glacier access for the future.”
Elsewhere in the world the first Norwegian spring-autumn only area, the Galdhopiggen glacier opens for its 2024 season this weekend with two similar areas set to follow. Riksgransen in Sweden opened in late February and is currently offering its annual skiing-under-the-midnight0sun 10pm to 1am opening slot as 24 hour daylight has returned there. Japan’s Gassan opened last month for its 2024 season and is posting the world’s current deepest snowpack at around 6 metres (20 feet) and Italy’s Passo Stelvio is also saying it has huge amounts of snow lying and that it’ll open for its 2024 season on May 31st.
