Kitzbühel Opens

Kitzbühel has managed to get its winter 16-17 ski season underway, the first non-glacier ski resort in Europe to do so with fresh snow, and opening less than 20 hours after Arapahoe Basin became the first on-glacier ski area in the northern hemisphere to open for the16-17 season with fresh snow.

The 'with fresh snow' proviso is an important one as two Scandinavian non-glacier ski areas have opened in the past three weeks – Geilo in Norway and Ruka in Finnish Lapland – but both are re-using snow stockpiled from the end of the 15-16 ski season.

Kitzbühel in the ninth Austrian area to open for the season, following the country's eight glacier ski areas.

It has opened for the weekend only at Resterkogel / Pass Thurn in the resort's Kirchberg sector but plans to re-open next weekend on the 29th and stay open permanently through the winter from then on.

Skiing takes place on the Resterkogel with access from Breitmoos on the Panoramabahn II cable car, open from 8.45am to 4pm.

Two ski runs: Resterhöhe No. 70 (to the Resterhöhe mountain station) and Resterkogel No. 71 are open with the lift company describing conditions as 'magnificent.'



Kitzbühel, home to Austria's largest cable car company, have continuously pushed the conventional boundaries of the ski season, particularly over the past decade since a UN sponsored report identified it as a likely early victim of climate change because its ski area is one of the lowest altitude major centres in the Alps.

This is in direct contrast to Arapahoe Basin where the lowest slopes are more than 1000 vertical metres higher than the highest at Kitzbuhel, and the upper slopes among the 20 highest in the world.

Kitzbuhel's lift company operates 1,068 snowmaking machines and has ten reservoir lakes to feed them with a combined capacity of approximately 725,000m³ It makes expert use of this technology to open ski slopes when temperatures down in resort were 10C.

Les 2 Alpes and St Moritz also opened on Saturday, with slopes on their glaciers. Arose Lenzerheide in Switzerland plans to open terrain next weekend using a special plus-temperatures snowmaking system.

Have skied A basin twice, and narrowly missed another visit in March, due to bad weather conditions on the Vail pass.

Also ski Kitz almost every season, and will be driving over from Niederau again in mid January. I often go on the Tuesday pre-Hahnemkamm, and watch the practice runs. Just as good as the race.

The note "UN sponsored report identified it as a likely early victim of climate change" is somewhat contentious, since the general implication is that CC is totally man made, whereas in reality, CC has been a part of the earth's history.

Dave Mac wrote:The note "UN sponsored report identified it as a likely early victim of climate change" is somewhat contentious, since the general implication is that CC is totally man made, whereas in reality, CC has been a part of the earth's history.

I thought the report was actually an OECD one but who's quibbling.

Much more importantly, it always struck me as a really crass report to produce anyway. If I recall correctly, it basically simulated the impact on the ski industry of a rise in global temperatures and concluded something along the lines of "a 2 degree celsius increase in temperature would mean less snow at lower altitudes and mean that most ski resorts relying on skiing below 2,000m asl would no longer be viable".

Of course, a temperature increase of this magnitude would probably mean the permanent flooding of large tracts of low lying land all over the world. Much of the east of England would be under water while places like Bangladesh would probably be completely covered. It would probably also bring catastrophic weather related disasters resulting in very large losses of human life. In this context, the impact on skiing seems pretty unimportant (much and all as we love it).