Zugspitze

Skiing on Germany’s highest mountain

The Zugspitze, at 2,962 m, is the highest mountain in Germany and the highest peak of the Wetterstein range. It stands south of Garmisch-Partenkirchen in Bavaria, and the Austria-Germany border runs across its western summit. The ski area is not on the summit itself but on the Zugspitzplatt, the high karst plateau south of the peak, riddled with caves and flanked by the two largest glaciers in Germany, the Northern Schneeferner (30.7 hectares) and the Höllentalferner (24.7 hectares). A third, the Southern Schneeferner, shrank so far that it lost its glacier status in 2022.

The skiing

Our data lists 20 km of piste on ten lifts (Wikipedia counts nine on the Zugspitzplatt), between a base at 2,000 m and a top at 2,720 m. The base is the striking figure: the entire ski area sits above 2,000 m, and the top station is high enough that altitude does real work for snow reliability. Zugspitze is flagged snow-sure in our data, and the numbers make the case more clearly than for any other German resort; compare Winterberg, whose top station is at 820 m.

What the numbers also say is that this is a small area: 720 m of vertical and 20 km of piste is a day or two of skiing, not a week. There is no difficulty split in our records. The appeal is the altitude, the security of the season and the scenery, which our data also flags, rather than mileage, and the top of the ski area at 2,720 m is still some 240 m below the summit that the sightseers are heading for.

Getting up the mountain

Getting there is half the experience. The Bavarian Zugspitze Railway, a rack railway, runs inside the northern flank of the mountain and ends on the Zugspitzplatt, where the ski lifts are. Three cable cars reach the summit: the Tyrolean Zugspitze Cable Car from the Austrian side, built in 1926 by Adolf Bleichert & Co and extended from an arête at 2,805 m to the actual summit at 2,951 m in 1991; the Eibsee Cable Car; and a short cableway between the Platt and the Schneefernerhaus, a former hotel that has been an environmental research station since 1999, with a weather station dating from 1900. The rack railway and the Eibsee cable car between them carry an average of 500,000 people a year to the summit, so the ski lifts share the mountain with a great many people who have no intention of skiing.

Mountaineering context

The Zugspitze was first climbed on 27 August 1820 by Josef Naus, his survey assistant Maier and the mountain guide Johann Georg Tauschl. Three normal routes lead to the top today, from the Höllental to the north-east, the Reintal to the south-east and over the Austrian Cirque from the west, and the knife-edged Jubilee Ridge linking the Zugspitze, the Hochblassen and the Alpspitze is one of the best-known ridge routes in the Eastern Alps. The Münchner Haus on the western summit and the Wiener-Neustädter Hut on the western slopes serve mountaineers.

Practicalities

Innsbruck airport is roughly 32 km away as the crow flies, across the Austrian border. The season runs December to April, and the resort’s official website has current lift and snow information.