Jump Up To 10,000 Feet: How Climate Change Drives Europe’s Ski Travel To A (High) Tyrolean Glacier

Americans caught in the maw of December’s 2022 onslaught of subfreezing winter storms will have difficulty believing it, but Europe has had a warm winter thus far. Prague, which lies just two degrees of latitude north of beleaguered Buffalo, is at this writing enjoying a 51-degree New Year’s Eve. True, Britain got a taste of the freeze, as did Central Europe in early December, but that melted literally overnight as springlike rains drenched hopes of a white Christmas and the croci started to emerge. Dang! Missing Ol’ Man Winter now that he’s gone.

In European travel terms, all this tepid sloshing about has left the rivers dangerously full and the most beloved Alpine ski slopes bereft of that special money-making wintertime commodity, snow. It’s not as if there’s no snow in Chamonix or St. Moritz — there is, just — but right this minute St. Moritz is lollygagging in the throes of a “heat wave” that translates as a high of 38 degrees Fahrenheit for Saturday with more of the same next week, and at the very top of the mountain, there’s just a mere 20-inch base of the suddenly most rare ski-able commodity. At the bottom of the mountain there’s a bare 12-inch base.

That’s somewhat terrifying in all sorts of big and small ways, but in short, these are the sorts of numbers that herald late spring skiing and/or its attendant avalanche season rather than party-hearty turn-of-the-year deep winter ski trips.

So, that has come to pass, Europe is at this moment skiing as if it’s April. For the folks who really like to ski, among them this writer, the extremity of the patchwork weather has led to some new thinking and some new, if quite temporary, remedies. It’s important to emphasize that what follows is no permanent fix, rather, it’s a hasty, patchwork response to the larger problems that climate change poses to Europe’s finest winter resorts and to its tourism industry in general.

We’ll now direct your attention to the picture above of the skiers in the Austrian Tyrol. Specifically, they’re standing atop the Hintertux Glacier in the Zillertal, a tributary valley to the Inn river valley, about thirty miles as the bird flies from the city of Innsbruck. When it got really difficult to find a place to ski late last month, that weather meant that the extended winter holiday period became quite fraught for those travelers whose annual pilgrimages to ski the French, German and Italian Alps were already booked. They did the only thing they could do, which was to rebook some place where there was dependable snow, no matter the weather. Geo-physically put, that meant they had to seek altitude.

Incredible as it might seem given the Alps’ staggering reputation, there are just two high Alpine resorts that have ski-able year-round snow, one of which is Switzerland’s Zermatt. Zermatt is the better-known of the two because it’s considered one of the more “fabulous” ski-and-party destinations for skiers and non-skiers alike. The second resort is the Austrian Tyrol’s Hintertux Glacier, which can fairly be described as an unknown-to-Americans open secret among Europe’s ski cognoscenti. It’s cozy. Like Utah used to be before the film festival bigfooted everything.

Botttom line: Right now? Hintertux — the glacier itself is sporting a 1-meter (39-inch) base and has 17 lifts open — with 36 miles of trails. The larger Ziller valley has 57 lifts open to 98 miles of trails. Atop the glacier, you start your run at 10,000-plus feet. That’s solid high skiing.

Yes, Hintertux might be perceived as a rung or two down on the fabulosity-scale in relation to Zermatt or St. Moritz, but the many superb miles of open slopes of all classifications in the Zillertal, including the routes atop the great glacier itself, will help you get past the fact that those rockin’ little nightclubs you remember from last year in Chamonix just aren’t really the Tyrolean thing. Skiing is. And in really high-altitude skiing, the Hüt­te — the “huts” and/or the “alms” — are your support system. They’re homey, comfortable, and really friendly. There’s something grand about their no-nonsense local cooking, and the Austrian white wines are top-of-the-world crisp, clean and green. Put another way, the Tyroleans have been doing mountains for thousands of years, and they know how to make you feel at home.

That noted, if you’re expecting the white-glove service or the serious luxe you’d find at Badrutt’s Palace in St. Moritz, you’ll be better off waiting for St. Moritz to build back some of its base. Which, at this rate in this winter, could take a while.

All of which is why the skiers in the photograph above are in the photograph, taken five weeks ago: They’re what we might call vacationing climate-change refugees who, like the thousands of Europeans who made, or changed, their holiday plans to pack into Hintertux this season, are seeking security of snow at altitude.