South American Ski Areas Announces Summer Ski Season

Argentina’s Las Leñas ski area has caused some surprise by announcing that it plans to operate summer skiing this season.

Summer skiing is offered by about a dozen ski areas in Europe’s alps and Scandinavia and a few areas in Japan and north America, but the numbers offering it have ben falling for over 20 years, as has the length of the summer ski seasons that remain.

However summer skiing is fairly unheard of at southern hemisphere resorts although some New Zealand ski areas, most notably on Mt Ruapehu, have managed to stay open to the start of summer some occasionally.

Las Leñas says summer skiers can take its highest lift to the summit at 3470 metres where it’s easy  a green run, Iris, with a length of approximately 800 metres (half a mile) will be open. The plan is to run the lift for mornings and sell a ticket including rentals. Skiers and riders should have at least “basic knowledge” of their sport to take part, the resort says.

Las Leñas is celebrating 40 years operations in 2023, it’s not known if it has offered summer skiing before, but it did get some big snowfalls in the latter half of last winter, which some have tied to the strong El Niño which  means there’s a lot of snow left up high this summer.