Skiing & Snowsports in May

Riksgransen is the most northerly ski resort in Sweden and one of the strangest and best in the world, because here the season barely starts before spring and runs on until midsummer. Sitting right on the Norwegian border 200 kilometers above the Arctic Circle, it opens around February and stays open into late June, and its signature is midnight-sun skiing: in May and June the lifts run into the night and you can ski under a sun that never sets. The terrain is what draws serious skiers, a compact lift-served area backed by big off-piste bowls, couloirs and long ridge lines dropping toward the fjords, with easy access to guided ski touring and heli-skiing across the border peaks. Snow quality this far north stays cold and stable late into spring, and the light, low and golden for hours, is unlike anything in the Alps. The Arctic train from Narvik delivers you almost to the piste, past mountains and fjords, and the historic Meteorologen lodge sits beside the station. For spring skiing with a midnight sun, Riksgransen has no real equal.

In the Lyngen Alps, 1,200 to 1,800 meter peaks drop directly into the fjord, so descents literally end at the tideline. It is widely considered Europe's premier ski-touring arena outside the Alps, and the culture is deliberately helicopter-free: access is by skins, boat, and lodge, with IFMGA-certified guiding at the top operators. The season outlasts the Alps by weeks, running mid-February to the end of May, and April-May is the honest prime, with a stable snowpack, corn cycles, and daylight that never really ends. Ski-and-sail weeks, living aboard and touring a new summit each day, are the format the region made famous.

The Troll Peninsula is where Icelandic heli-skiing was born: IFMGA guide Jokull Bergmann turned his family's Viking-era Klaengsholl farm into the country's first heli operation in 2008, and the peninsula above Dalvik still holds Iceland's biggest lift-free terrain. Descents run up to 1,200 to 1,500 vertical meters and finish at the Arctic Ocean shoreline, and the season's trick is its tail: April and May bring corn snow, stable weather, and near-24-hour daylight, so you can ski to the sea under the midnight sun weeks after the Alps have shut down. Bergmenn Mountain Guides, Iceland's first IFMGA guide service, runs lodge-based touring weeks and the hut-to-hut Troll Traverse for those who prefer to earn their turns.

Zermatt is the summit of the ski world in the literal sense: the highest lift-served skiing in Switzerland at 3,883 meters, glacier runs that operate year-round, and the Matterhorn standing over every descent. For ski tourers it is the destination in the oldest sense, the finishing line of the Haute Route from Chamonix, six or seven days of glacier travel and 3,000-meter cols through the Valais that ends with the Matterhorn filling the horizon, the most famous ski tour on earth and a guided rite of passage for fit ski mountaineers. Around the touring, the resort's 360 kilometers of pistes link over the Theodul pass into Italy's Cervinia, and the village's guiding institutions run everything from first off-piste days to 4000er ski descents.