About this project
AbandonedSkiTowns.com is a record of ski resorts that have closed, been abandoned, or been left to the mountain.
What is here
The archive currently holds 234 resorts across 33 countries and six continents. Each entry records what the place was, when it opened, when it stopped running, and as far as the sources allow, why. Where lift equipment is documented we list it by name, type and manufacturer; where the trail names survive we list those too.
Some of these places closed within living memory and still have towers standing in the trees. Others were single rope tows on a village slope that ran for a few winters in the 1960s and left almost nothing behind. Both are worth recording.
How entries are written
Every field is traced to a source. Where a fact is not documented, the field is left empty rather than filled with a plausible guess. That applies to lift names, opening years and closure reasons alike. An entry that says little is an entry where little is known, and it is preferred to one that reads well but invents.
Resorts are checked against contemporary reporting before being added. Several candidates that circulate on ghost-resort blogs turned out to still be operating, and were left out.
Licence and reuse
The archive — the entries, the research behind them and the site itself — is © tortoiga, all rights reserved. Individual facts may be quoted with a link back to the entry they came from. Copying the archive in bulk, republishing it, or using it to train or populate another database is not permitted without written permission.
To ask about reuse, write to hello@abandonedskitowns.com.
Contributing
The list is far from complete, and new resorts are added every year. If you know a lost ski area that is not here, if you have photographs or trail maps, or if you spot something wrong, please get in touch.
Contribute a resort using the form, or write to hello@abandonedskitowns.com.