Kitzbuhel has joined a small group of ski areas that offers snowsports for at least 200 days of the season – that is, a season lasting almost 7 months, sometimes longer.
Most of the existing members of the club – which has less than 20 permanent members worldwide – are glacier ski areas, but there are also a few resorts that manage to qualify due to their high altitude, northerly latitude or just the fact that they get an awful lot of snow.
It’s fairly safe to say that the areas are normally among the most snowsure in the world for one or more of these reasons.
Kitzbuhel has joined the club by pushing back on it’s season start and end dates over the past few seasons so that it opens some terrain in early October and closes in May. It manages this by snow farming – saving snow from the previous winter under cover and spreading it out on the slopes in early autumn the following year.
Other members of the ‘200 Club’ include around a dozen glaciers in the Alps, the high altitude resort of Arapahoe Basin in Colorado which is often open from October to June and the northern Scandinavian resorts of Levi and Ruka in Finland.
Mammoth in California is sometimes open from mid-autumn to early summer due to all the snow it gets and the permanent snowfield above Timberline Lodge on Mt Hood in Oregon is open more than 300 days each year.
