Ski resorts were built on one promise: reliable snow. That promise is getting harder to keep, especially lower down. In Switzerland, a slope needs roughly 30 cm of snow for about 100 days to be worth grooming and running, and resorts below around 1,600 m are the most exposed. Swiss media count 167 ski areas that have already closed, with dozens of abandoned lifts left rusting on the hillsides. Some, like Monte Tamaro and Les Paccots, have stopped skiing altogether.

France has heard the same warning from the very top. In February 2024 the Cour des comptes – France’s national audit court – described the French ski model as “running out of steam”.

The court predicted that every resort will be affected by climate change by 2050, with only a few likely to keep going beyond that, and called on authorities to stop pouring public money mainly into snow cannons and to fund year-round, diversified mountain tourism instead.

Experts quoted around the report put the danger zone clearly: alpine skiing below about 1,500 m faces a very uncertain future, and slopes below about 1,800 m will become increasingly hard to run in the 2030s.

Around 150 French ski areas have already closed in the last 20 years, and low resorts such as Alpe du Grand Serre, Le Lioran and Ventron have struggled to find the money to keep their lifts turning.

The pattern is the same across the border: of 65 lifts that have closed in Switzerland, 26 were below 1,500 m – and only four were above 2,000 m.

The money isn’t disappearing from the mountains – it is moving. High, snow-sure resorts keep investing (Serre Chevalier has invested in a new gondola, with its operator insisting people will “still ski in 2050”), while lower resorts are pushed to find a future beyond snow. And that future very often has two wheels.

In the US, the story is similar at the small end of the market: well over 1,600 ski areas have closed since the 1960s, especially small, low-lying hills in the Northeast and Midwest. And even big resorts feel it in bad years – after a warm, thin winter in 2025/26, western North American resorts saw winter lodging occupancy fall 7%, with April almost 22% down in revenue.

Whole valleys depend on those visitors: the hotels, restaurants, ski schools, bike and ski shops, mountain huts and the families who run them. When the snow fails, the question is simple – what keeps the lifts turning and the beds full?