End of season on March 1

Goodbye snow: the Sternstein has already closed

Sternstein operations manager Mario Kreuzmayr on the finish slope.(Bild: Sternstein, Krone KREATIV)

Too little cold and too little snow: the small Mühlviertel ski resort on the Sternstein near Bad Leonfelden is ending this year's winter season today, Friday. It was simply too difficult to prepare the slopes. The major cable cars in Upper Austria want to continue until Easter.

"We stayed open as long as we could. But the snow conditions simply didn't allow us to continue," says Mario Kreuzmayr, Operations Manager of the Sternstein lifts, explaining why the season was already over on Friday in the Mühlviertel ski resort: "On the family slope, we only have five centimetres of snow in places and the track is a maximum of ten meters wide. In the evening, it was always a challenge to prepare the slope again because the temperatures were simply too high in the afternoon. Even at night, 99 percent of the time we never got below zero degrees."

A shot from the webcam on the "Stern"(Bild: Sternstein)

The Sternstein lifts opened on December 7 and have since counted between 55,000 and 66,000 guests.

Hinterstoder holds out
Hinterstoder and the Wurzeralm are not thinking of closing yet. CEO Helmut Holzinger admits that the slopes below 1000 meters are rather modest, but sings the praises of the snow conditions above. "We have up to two meters of snow there. When people come to us, they are always blown away by how good it is here."

"We produced enough snow in the fall"
Seven of the 20 slopes on Kasberg are currently open, and the hope is for cold weather and snow. A premature end is not planned, according to Managing Director Fritz Drack.Dachstein West, Krippenstein and Feuerkogel are open and should remain so until April 1st: "Fortunately, we produced enough snow in autumn and have a fully automatic snowmaking system everywhere, which doesn't miss a minute if the temperature allows it," says spokesman Peter Grögler.