Skiing & Snowsports in July

Afriski is Africa's only operating ski resort, and skiing here is a genuine novelty rather than a compromise. The resort sits at about 3,050 meters in the Maluti Mountains, just below the Mahlasela Pass at 3,222 meters, high enough that the winter cold and snowmaking hold a run of piste from June to August while the rest of Southern Africa is dry and brown. The ski area is small, roughly 1.8 kilometers of groomed slope served by a drag lift and a rope tow, so this is not the Alps, but it is a real snow mountain with a ski and snowboard school, hire shop and a floodlit night-ski session, and the altitude and mountain light make it memorable. Southern-Hemisphere winter, June to August, is the only window for snow. Out of season Afriski flips to a high-altitude base for hiking, mountain biking, trail running and fly fishing. Because it sits on the tarred A1 near the top of the Moteng and Mahlasela passes, it is also one of the more accessible corners of the Lesotho highlands, about four and a half hours from Johannesburg.

Cerro Catedral is the Southern Hemisphere's largest ski area: roughly 120 km of runs, some 40 lifts, and famously easy access to lift-served sidecountry and tree skiing, all 30 minutes from a real lakeside town rather than an isolated ski station. For northern skiers it means July powder in what is otherwise their summer, with a season stretching from late June to early October. The refugio touring above the resort, Frey most famously, is a classic in its own right, and Cerro Bayo and Chapelco within striking distance turn a week into a multi-mountain trip.

Portillo runs on a model no other major resort uses: one hotel, booked Saturday to Saturday, which caps the number of skiers on the mountain, so the pistes above Laguna del Inca stay close to empty even in peak August. The US, Austrian, and Norwegian speed teams train here every northern summer for the same reasons visitors come: reliable Andean snow, steep terrain served by the famous va-et-vient slingshot lifts, and couloirs that conventional chairs cannot reach. For a northern skier it is July powder with a lake the color of ink at the bottom of every run.

Thredbo is Australia's premier alpine resort, with the country's longest runs off its highest lifted point at around 2,037m in Kosciuszko National Park, and its calendar is the point: full-scale lift-served skiing in July and August, when every northern-hemisphere resort is closed. The snowsports school is one of the largest instruction programs in the country, and the adjacent Main Range offers genuine backcountry touring to the summit of Mount Kosciuszko itself, Australia's highest point, guided as splitboard and touring clinics rather than a lift-line experience. It will not out-snow the Alps; it will out-July them.