The latest in a long line of machines that uses a ‘revolving slope’, it’s surface constantly moving towards the skier for an ‘eternal ski run’ has been unveiled by an Australian company.

Snowtunnel Technology, a tech licensing startup has done further than most of its predecessors by actually building a prototype.

The idea is that you ski inside a giant revolving drum, with snow also dropping into the base of the drum with you, so you always have fresh snow to ski on and are always moving downhill as the drum revolves.

Company founder and Snow Tunnel inventor Darren Visser and company MD and CEO) Chris Northwood say a key driving force behind their desire to see Snow Tunnels appearing around the world is to make it easier for skiing to happen anywhere, pointing out that:

“Half the countries in the world have no snow fall at all, snow seasons are short – only 3 to 4 months per year, travelling to a snow resort can take many hours or even days, and it can be expensive, crowded and often adversely impacted by weather.”

Currently the most successful mechanical eternal ski slopes use dry slope carpet surfaces and act like giant treadmills. Dutch companies SkiMachine by Alpine Engineering and Maxxtracks have sold many hundreds of these machines around the world.

There have also been a number of concepts, dating to the late 1990s and early ‘noughties for eternal indoor mountains. One of these was conceived by another Australian start-up called Ski-Trac (below, a 1996 plan for Sydney)(, another very similar by Scottish company Snowvolution. Neither reached prototype stage.

Their idea was for a giant revolving, cone shaped indoor mountain, rotating thanks to Maglev technology. Snowmaking would constant deposit fresh snow on the revolving cone and skiers would descend against the movement of the slope.

Although a prototype of either machine, envisaged as 60 to 200 metres in diameter, was never built, again a small version using a fairground platform similar to a slightly tilted Merry-go round covered in dry slope carpeting, has been proved to work.