Banff Sunshine plans summer ski season after snowy winter
Posted on: May 07, 2026 18:30 IST | Posted by: Cbc
Banff Sunshine hamlet says an exceptionally snowy overwinter is allowing it to contrive for a summertime ski flavor.
Its regular winter ski season will end on May 18. About a month later, it expects to reopen for a 16-day summer ski season from June 20 to July 5.
Kendra Scurfield, a representative of Sunshine Village, says the amount of snow still on the mountain gave the resort confidence to plan for this summer.
“It was a fairytale season,” she says. “And the snow kept on coming and coming and coming.”
The resort expects to run one chairlift, the Strawberry Express, and several ski runs. Scurfield said more details will be made public in the coming weeks.
Scurfield says the resort is unique in its ability to offer skiing in the middle of summer.
“We at Sunshine are exceptionally lucky. Because we're so high above the tree-line and we have such a wonderful elevation, the snow tends to stick around longer than it does at other resorts,” she says.
John Pomeroy, a professor at the University of Saskatchewan who studies precipitation in the Rockies, agrees that Sunshine’s high elevation is why the resort can accumulate and preserve more snow.
He says higher elevations like the Sunshine area get almost double the amount of precipitation than the communities in the valley bottom, like the towns of Banff and Canmore.
This is the second time in nearly 35 years the resort has been able to do this. Scurfield says the area had heavy snowfall in 2022 and decided at the last minute to open for around six days over the Canada Day weekend.
Scurfield says people embraced the novelty of skiing on Canada Day — some even hit the slopes in shorts.
“It was pretty wild and a little bit unusual and very Canadian,” says Scurfield.
After the success of the 2022 season, Scurfield says the resort decided it would try to offer summer skiing again whenever conditions allowed.
Pomeroy confirms the area around Sunshine has well above the normal amount of snow for this time of year.
“At Sunshine, we’d normally expect about 600 millimetres of snow water equivalent at this time of year, but it’s been around 830. By comparison, last year it was only 409 millimetres,” he says.
Pomeroy says this spring has been cool, meaning the snowpack has not melted as much as it normally would by this point in the season.
However, Pomeroy says warmer-than-average temperatures forecast for May could make it harder for Sunshine to preserve enough snow for its summer plans.
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