By admin 
As the Alps and Western Europe continue to bake amid a record-hot summer, another summer ski area in the region, Passo Stelvio, has called it quits for now.
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The ski area, located high on a mountain pass in northern Italy, only operates during the warmer months (typically from May to November), making it a destination for elite skiers looking to train regardless of the season. This year, though, the temperatures—typically a nice break from the usually frigid ski experience—got too warm, prompting the closure.
“This decision, painful but necessary, has been made unavoidable by the adverse weather conditions affecting the area over the past few weeks,” a message shared on the ski area’s website reads, citing heat waves even at high altitudes, a lack of cold nighttime temperatures, and frequent storms that compromised the glacier further.
“These factors make it impossible to guarantee the usual standards of quality and, above all, of safety required for summer skiing,” the message reads. “Our team will continue to constantly monitor the situation and the conditions of the mountain, in the hope of a drop in temperatures and an improvement in the state of the glacier.”
The closure follows two others at high alpine summer ski areas in Europe—Switzerland’s Saas-Fee and Zermatt—and comes during a historically hot summer for the western side of the continent.
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The heatwaves, linked to human-caused climate change, have contributed to wildfires and caused thousands of excess deaths.
“Heatwaves like this are what we expect to see in a changing climate,” said John Kennedy, head of climate information at the World Meteorological Organization, in a release earlier this summer. “In the 50 years since the historic heatwave in 1976, Europe as a whole has warmed by around two degrees. It’s the fastest warming continents and extremes of temperature have increased too.”
Climbing freezing levels have also challenged ski resorts beyond the summer. Some mountains have closed entirely because of the lack of snow. Others have looked to diversify their offerings, leaning into off-season activities that don’t involve skiing or snowboarding.
The fate of Europe’s summer ski scene, meanwhile, is tied to the glaciers used by resorts. And those glaciers are on the back foot beyond one particularly hot summer. The Swiss glacier monitoring group GLAMOS and the Swiss Academy of Sciences said in a report last year that Switzerland’s ice mass had declined by one-quarter over the last decade.
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This story was originally published August 17, 2026 at 1:43 PM.