Construction of World’s First Revolving Snowtunnel Well Underway

Reports from Australia indicate construction of a giant machine in which skiers and riders can effectively ‘slide forever’ is underway and continuing at pace with completion potentially before the end of the year.

The Snowtunnel concept, a huge rotating cylinder in which skiers and riders constantly ‘descend’ as the slope moves towards them, also constantly refilling with fresh snow, was first announced in 2022.

Now the Snowtunnel company is building its first facility in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia, the country where its founders are based. The aim though is for more Snowtunnels to be built around the world.

Snowtunnel say construction at Braybrook, a suburb of Melbourne, their first location, is now well underway, with the company confirming that the full-size rotating tunnel has already been manufactured and delivered to the site.

Construction crews are currently assembling the structure alongside its dedicated snow room, which will use snow created by all-weather snow experts TechnoAlpin, with real snow produced inside the refrigerated facility.

The Snowtunnel machine itself measures approximately 12.5 metres high and 16 metres in diameter. Once complete, the company say its rotating snow-covered interior will provide around 600 square metres of continuously rideable terrain, allowing skiers and snowboarders to remain in motion without the need for lifts or tow systems.

The pilot installation is being developed within an existing 1,200-square-metre building in Braybrook. Snowtunnel says site acquisition, planning approvals, manufacturing and delivery of the main structure have all been completed, with physical construction now focused on assembling the tunnel and snowmaking infrastructure. They’ve published video of construction underway on their Melbourne-specific page and a timeline.

Once construction is complete, the next phase will involve making snow with rider testing now expected early in the new year, with a planned public opening at some point in 2027.

Although the construction of the first Snowtunnel from the company's foundation in less than five years seems quite rapid, the team behind the venture are reported to have been fine tuning their concept for many years before formally establishing their business and the idea of a snow-covered revolving year-round indoor snow slope in a different form goes back further still.

There have been various concepts for revolving snow slopes over the past 30 years, probably longer, although most envisaged a kind of revolving mountain inside a dome that rotated horizontally with skiers constantly descending and the slope passing through a chamber on each circuit where fresh snow was deposited on it at each rotation. The huge structures were to use maglev technology to be suspended just above the ground in order to be able to revolve.

Another Australian company, Ski-Trac, tried to get a facility built through the 1990s and early 2000s. A Scottish company Snowvolution had a similar idea in the early 2000s and made similar efforts to get at least a prototype built, ultimately without success. The two concepts would have required investments of many tens of millions in their unproven plans to get built, which despite many years of proposed sites around the world, ultimately wasn't forthcoming.

However a prototype in the Netherlands that used something like an old fairground Waltzer ride covered with dry slope material did successfully prove that the concept worked with skiers constantly descending the rotating slope as it moved towards them.

Known as R-Evelution the disk was tilted but rather than remaining in a constantly fixed position it has a central pivot and the slope moves up and down, effectively creating a constant wave behind the skier.

The brain child of Rob van Schie, who founded Alpine Sports in 1995, the revolving ski carpet works like a little like the giant runners treadmill on a slope such as SkiMachine, which are particularly popular in Belgium and The Netherlands although also seen in UK, US and even Turkey.

“I was always thinking how to improve these endless slope machines and create a more realistic "feeling" of winter sports.” said Rob van Schie back in 2010, “We did some tests with real snow on the conveyer ski slopes but that didn't work out because of the amount of energy you need for the snow making.”

In his ongoing search however Mr van Schie found a British patent and visited the inventor, Robert Harvey, who showed him a 30cm disc shaped model. The concept continued to interest Mr van Schie and in 2001 he came up with his own version, named it R-Evelution, gained the patent and built a 12m wide prototype at his facility at Den Hoorn in the Netherlands. It opened that September and up to now has been the world’s only revolving indoor snow slope of its type.

“It cost €150,000 and it is used for skiing and snowboarding, but is most popular for tubing. If I build another one I will change a few things so the skiing and boarding can be more realistic and make it at least 20 metres wide.” Rob van Schie commented in 2010.