Ski Touring Balkans — Kosovo, Albania & Montenegro

Ski Touring in Kosovo, Albania and Montenegro — The Short Version

The skiing happens in two ranges. The Accursed Mountains — the Albanian Alps, Bjeshkët e Nemuna, Prokletije, depending which side of the border you are standing on — straddle Kosovo, Albania and Montenegro and hold the biggest terrain: Maja Jezercë at 2,694 m, Gjeravica at 2,656 m, the highest point in Kosovo. The Sharr Mountains run along the North Macedonian border: broader, gentler, more reliably covered.

Some nights you sleep in Peja or Prizren. The better ones you don’t. The Gacaferi Mountain Guesthouse stands alone in the Deçan Gorge. Doberdol is a shepherds’ settlement at 1,740 m in Albania that a few families keep open through the winter. Guesthouse Hrid sits under its lake in Montenegro’s Prokletije National Park. You ski in and you ski out. No road is ploughed to the door, there is no lift and no piste, and after dark there is no light but the one you carried up.

There is no public avalanche forecast for any of these mountains. None of the three countries operates an avalanche warning service, and none is a member of the European Avalanche Warning Services. There is no avalanche control outside the Brezovica pistes. Search and rescue here is professional but volunteer-based: a trained team of 30 to 40 people covering the whole region, the Sharr as well as the Accursed Mountains, and the only organised rescue capacity in these mountains. They are good. They are also not fifteen minutes away. Mobile coverage is intermittent to non-existent. Transceiver, probe and shovel, and the training to use them, are not negotiable here.

So we tell you what we see rather than what we forecast. North and north-west aspects hold wind slab longest, into spring. Nobody has characterised this snowpack across a season — there is no service here to do it, and we would rather say that than guess. Every route we publish carries its slope angles and aspects, so you can judge the terrain yourself.