Five Austrian glacier cameras already watching skiers

At 03:15 this morning the camera at the top of the Gefrorene Wand, 3,250 m up the Hintertux glacier, was serving a frame taken three minutes earlier, in the dark. It had a new one by 03:21. Five Austrian glaciers are running lifts this week, which is where the first turns of the 2026/27 season are actually being made, and most of them have a camera pointed at the piste.

The five that are open, and when each one started

Hintertux is the one that never really stops. Its own site gives the opening hours as 365 days a year, daily from 08.15 to 16.30, and on 2026-10-28 it was telling visitors that skiing is already in full swing in the Zillertal and inviting them to make their first turns on groomed slopes. The Gefrorene Wand camera is the one to open: a panomax panorama from the top station, and I timed two consecutive frames at 01:12:09 and 01:21:54 UTC today, so call it ten minutes between pictures.

Pitztal has been at it the longest. Its news panel says the first turns of the 2026/27 mountain winter season "can be made since SAT 26 SEP", and the header carried 15 cm when I loaded it this morning. Glacier autumn means a short day: lifts run 07.00 to 13.00, which is the only window worth opening the Gletscherexpress top station camera in. The resort puts its official winter start at the Testival on 6 to 8 November.

Stubai opened on 9 October and is adding to it today. The front page read 12 of 25 lifts and 8 of 40 slopes at -4 °C when I loaded it, under a notice that "from Friday 23 October we will be expanding our range of slopes and facilities and opening the snow park". It has three cameras worth knowing: Schaufeljoch peak station at the top of the lift system, then Fernau Mittelstation and Murmele Bergstation below it. The Schaufeljoch page was reporting 100% uptime over its last seven checks, latest 23 Oct 2026.

Kaunertal is the newest of the five. "Start of the season: Saturday // 17 Oct", it says, with 15 cm beside the glacier weather link. The Karlesjochbahn camera sits at the top of that lift, where the view on a clear morning takes in three countries.

Sölden is the one with a reason to watch it this weekend. Its live panel gave 8 of 31 lifts, 23.9 of 147.2 km of slopes, snow of 0 to 49 cm and -1.0 °C today, and the Audi FIS Ski World Cup opening runs on 24 and 25 October 2026. Four cameras cover the two glaciers above the village: Rettenbachgletscher Talstation, Schwarze Schneidbahn Mittelstation, Tiefenbachgletscher Talstation and the Felssteg top station above it. I could not find a public camera aimed at the race slope itself, so the base and mid-station views are as close as any of these get to the course.

What they do after dark

Worth knowing before you open one at the wrong hour. At 01:18 UTC I read the Last-Modified header on all seven feeds behind the cameras above. The four panomax ones were minutes old. The three feratel ones, Pitztal's Gletscherexpress, Kaunertal's Karlesjochbahn and Stubai's Fernau, were all still holding the previous evening's last frame: 16:09:38, 16:15:06 and 16:20:07 UTC on 22 October. Three cameras, three different mountains, stopping within eleven minutes of each other and of local sunset.

It reads to me like feratel's glacier cameras stop at dusk and pick up again at first light, rather than three of them having broken at the same moment on the same evening. Which gives you a simple rule. A feratel glacier camera is a daytime proposition, roughly 07.00 to 18.00 local. A panomax one will hand you a dark mountain at three in the morning if that is what you want.

North America has not started yet

Colorado is a few weeks behind all of this. Arapahoe Basin, normally the first of them open, was showing 0 of 9 lifts, 0 of 147 runs and a zero inch base today, with the page still saying it is "closed for the summer season" and will "open for winter ASAP". OnTheSnow's projected openings put A-Basin and Winter Park at 30 October, Keystone at 31 October, and Loveland, Breckenridge and Copper Mountain at 6 November, and the page says plainly that those are projections.

So the cameras to keep in a tab for North America are the snow stakes. Vail, Beaver Creek, Crested Butte, Purgatory and Mt Bachelor over in Oregon each point a camera at a marked board, and a board is the fastest honest read there is on whether snow has actually landed. We went through how to read one in an earlier post this month.

What we are doing with these

We are keeping the ski cameras moving as resorts open, which in practice means re-checking this list every week or two: the opening dates above will be stale by mid November and the cameras will not be. The glacier five are the start of it, not the shape of it.

The thing I cannot answer yet is what feratel does at the other end of the night. Whether those cameras come back at a fixed hour or at a light level is a question of leaving a sampler running from 04:00 local, and I have not done it. If a stake camera somewhere in Colorado reads above zero before 30 October, I would like to know which one got there first.