Snow under the chairs at Killington, and six more cameras before opening day
At 09:16 Eastern this morning the North Ridge camera at the top of Killington showed snow under the chairs and brown hillside all the way down the valley behind it. A blue trail sign stands in the white, lift towers run off to either side, and the page counts five minutes between frames, so it reads as a slow flipbook rather than video. For late October that is the right speed, because nothing up there is moving yet.
Open Snowshed in the next tab and it is the same mountain on the same morning with none of the same winter: wet grass, a split-rail fence throwing long shadows across the plaza, a pickup parked by the lift shack and the sun straight into the lens. Two cameras, one mountain, one morning, and the white stops well above the base area.
The third one I keep open there is Superstar, which looks up at the ridge from the K-1 base rather than down from it. At 09:16 the summit had sun on it and everything below was still the colour of wet bark. I think that is the camera to watch in a cold snap: the white on that trail goes from a smear to a line before anything else on the mountain changes.
The ones already in winter
At 07:16 Mountain the base camera at Arapahoe Basin was inside a snow shower. Picnic tables under new snow, a lift tower as a grey outline in cloud, the far side of the plaza gone altogether. A-Basin's own page this morning still reads "We are closed for the summer season", with 0 of 9 lifts and 0 of 147 runs open and 9 October listed as its earliest opening day. Snow falling on a shut ski area is the whole of late October in Colorado in one frame.
Loveland's single camera on the site is CBS Colorado's feed from the top of Chair 2, and this morning its caption did the work the picture could not: ELEVATION: 12,050', stamped 10/26/2026 7:13:38 AM across a black rectangle. Nothing wrong with the camera. It was not light yet up there.
Lake Louise is the one that made me stop. Its base camera burns the numbers into the top of every frame, and at 07:01:04 local it read 1670 m and -8°C, the picture in greyscale night mode: snow across the whole base area, the lodge deck lit from underneath, and a groomer working in its own headlights by the lift shed. Lake Louise says it opens on 6 November, conditions permitting. Somebody was out there in the dark moving snow around eleven days early.
Two frames from above 2,900 metres
On the Trockener Steg camera above Zermatt, 2,939 m, read at 14:16 Swiss time, a gondola cabin hangs on the wire over the meltwater reservoir with the Matterhorn filling the top half of the frame and snow on every slope above the station. Whether the cabin was moving I cannot tell from one still, and I like that about it. It is a lift caught by accident, between towers, once every five minutes.
The other is Tignes at the top of the Grande Motte at 3,100 m, which turns out to be a strange and lovely file: one frame, 5,518 pixels wide, stitched into a full circle, with a rime-coated mast standing in the middle of it like a thumb over the lens. Snow in every direction, the lift station and its terrace below the camera, cloud shadow running across the Vanoise. On a 16:9 screen you see about a sixth of it at a time, so it is worth opening full width.
Lapland is running on stored snow
Ruka breaks the pattern. Its cameras are the best of this set, a minute between frames at a full 1,920 by 1,080, and the resort says the winter season has started on snow stored from last spring, with an early-season discount running from 2 October to 30 November 2026. Then the Vuosseli Express frame at 15:19 Finnish time shows wet tarmac, yellow grass, an unfrozen pond and a bare lift line going up into low cloud, with a string of festival lights hung across the top of the picture. Whatever is open is not in this frame. Skiing in Lapland this week is one white strip in a brown landscape, and the camera at the bottom of the hill only tells you about the brown.
What I will do with these seven
The site has 8,604 live ski cameras as of today, 1,978 of them in Switzerland, 1,190 in the United States and 33 in Finland. We re-check every camera once a day, so when one of these seven swaps its summer feed for a winter one, the new picture is on its page the same day rather than whenever somebody notices. I will open the same seven on the morning Killington opens and write down which of them got there first.
The frame I want, and cannot find many of, is the lift line itself. Ruka points a camera at the Vuosseli Express and Levi points one at chairs 13 and 14, but most resorts aim at the view instead, which is glorious in July and no use at all when you are trying to work out whether a queue has formed. If you know a resort that publishes a camera on the loading carpet, tell me which one. Opening day is a queue before it is a turn.