Winter Resorts
Four resorts with lifts on them, a whole country’s worth of mountains without. The weather comes off the Black Sea and unloads on the first ridge it hits, which is why the west is buried and the east is merely cold.
Read the snow plotThe snow plot
Six stakes, planted west to east. Hover or select one to read it.
West to east
Guria
The deepest snow in the country falls on a summer village. Nothing is groomed, nothing is patrolled, and there is no cable of any kind - you climb, or you pay a snowcat. A northern aspect keeps what falls in November there until spring.
Depths are typical mid-winter readings where a figure is published; the dashed line above Goderdzi is the deepest it has been reported. Nobody publishes a plot for the touring ground in Svaneti or Racha, so those stakes are left empty rather than guessed at.
Where the lifts run
Everything else in Georgia you climb yourself.
Mtskheta-Mtianeti
The country's biggest ski area, strung along the Georgian Military Highway two hours north of Tbilisi. Almost all of it sits above the treeline, which makes it look enormous and ski even bigger - the best runs drop a full kilometre from Sadzele, and the open bowls either side of the lifts are why every freeride operator in Georgia has an office here.
Samtskhe-Javakheti
Not one mountain but a handful of small ones around a pine-forest town, which is exactly why it is where Georgians learn to ski. Didveli, the profile drawn here, runs from 1,780 up to 2,700 metres and takes the serious skiing; Kokhta next door starts at 1,725 and is shorter, older and full of beginners. Trees, gentle pitches, and a town you can walk across.
Hatsvali and Tetnuldi
Two separate lift systems above Mestia, under the tallest peaks in the country. Hatsvali is the small one on the doorstep, 1,868 to 2,348 metres, in the trees, with the whole Caucasus range laid out in front of it. Tetnuldi, drawn here, is the serious one: bare, high, north-facing, and home to the longest ski slope in the South Caucasus.
Adjara
The resort hangs off the Goderdzi pass in upper Adjara, where the road tops out at 2,027 metres. It got its first cables in 2015 and has been quietly collecting Georgia's deepest snow ever since - three to four metres is a normal winter and it has been reported at six or seven. The catch is the drive: the pass is the hard part of getting here, which is most of the reason the slopes stay empty.
Bakuriani’s second life
From 19 February to 4 March 2023, Bakuriani ran the FIS Freestyle Ski and Snowboarding World Championships - the first snow-sports World Championships ever held in Georgia. Moguls, aerials, slopestyle, big air, halfpipe and snowboard cross, all on a hill whose usual job is teaching Georgian eight-year-olds to turn.
Both things are true at once, and that is the whole character of the place: shallow, forgiving, reliably groomed terrain, which is exactly what a slopestyle course and a beginner need.
Earned turns
Four touring regions, each one a step further from the last working cable.
Ride up, then skin off the back
Mestia, Tetnuldi, Ushguli
The gentlest way into Georgian touring, because the first 1,300 metres of the climb are done by chairlift. From the top of Tetnuldi the ridgelines run in every direction, and the bowls under Georgia's highest peaks are north-facing enough to keep January snow into April.
One lift, then the far side of the pass
Goderdzi and the upper valleys
Georgia's deepest snow sits on terrain nobody grooms. The resort covers a small corner of the Goderdzi pass; everything either side of it is untracked, low-angle and forested, and it refills within a day or two all winter.
No lifts. Villages instead
Shovi, Chiora, Glola
The classic circuit links three villages by ski, with real beds and real dinners at the bottom of each descent. High vertical, no infrastructure whatsoever, and the most unspoiled skiing in the country largely because getting there is a commitment.
Nothing. Not one cable
Guria, 2,050 m
A wooden summer village, empty and buried under four or five metres of snow. There is no lift and there never has been - you skin in, or you hire a snowcat, and either way the last road stops well below the houses.
Or buy the vertical
There is a third way up, and it is the dashed line running across this section. Helicopters fly out of Gudauri onto peaks the lifts will never reach, and snowcats drag skiers up the Bakhmaro slopes all winter. Neither is cheap. Both skip the climb entirely, which is either the point or the problem, depending on who you ask.
Before you go up
None of the touring ground on this page is patrolled, and none of it is avalanche-controlled. The deep maritime snowpack that buries Adjara and Guria is loaded by exactly the storms that make it good, and the slope angles that hold the best powder - roughly thirty to thirty-five degrees - are the angles that avalanche.
This is not somewhere to work it out as you go. Go with a qualified local guide, and get your conditions from them rather than from a forecast page.
Getting there
Bakuriani is about three hours from Tbilisi. The rest are further than the map suggests.
Gergeti, above the road to the Jvari Pass
Gudauri
120 km north of Tbilisi, climbing to the Jvari Pass. Two hours in good weather, and the single most scenic approach to any ski resort in the region.
When the pass shuts
Not one lift but four consecutive gondolas covering over seven kilometres, linking New Gudauri to Kobi village on the far side of the ridge. It is a ski lift, and it is also the road's understudy.
Svaneti
Roughly forty minutes over the Caucasus into Queen Tamar Airport at Mestia. The airfield is 25 km north of Tbilisi, not the international airport - and the road alternative takes most of a day.
Goderdzi
Up from Batumi through Khulo and onto the pass. The drive is the difficult part of the trip, which is a fair share of why the deepest snow in Georgia goes untracked.
The other half
The same weather that buries these mountains spends the rest of the year warming the sea it came from.