A Brief History Of The Weird Ways People Ski In Houston

The 2026 Winter Olympics are upon us, but Houstonians with a penchant for the slopes have little reason to celebrate. The city receives an average of 0.1 inches of snowfall annually and is flatter than a week-old seltzer. There’s little chance for an aspiring Olympian to take up skiing here. H-Town’s only tenuous claim to fame on the Winter Olympic slopes is Ashley Caldwell, a freestyle skier with remarkable aerial skills whose parents live in Houston. Caldwell herself resides in Utah.

However, “little” does not mean “none.” For half a century, people have been trying to bring skiing to Houston in some form or another, mostly in ways that range from charmingly bizarre to bizarrely illegal. Let’s take a turn through the black diamond run of skiing history in the Bayou City.

In 1976, the first infinity slope (sometimes called a skiing treadmill, indoor ski machine, or perpetual slope) opened in the Woodlake Square shopping center on Westheimer. KPRC visited Ski Houston to report, sending camera operator and former boxer Jesse Valdez up on the slope to try it out as you can see in this gloriously 1970s-era footage. Three Galveston men designed and built the first infinity slope in the city in their garage before opening up a storefront to teach Houstonians how to ski ahead of trips to more usual vacation ventures.

Using a patch of synthetic carpet that rotated at four miles-per-hour, visitors could ski gently downhill. Basic instructions included balance, maneuvering, stopping, and how to get back up after a fall. Lessons cost $80 for a five-hour session. That’s roughly $466 in today’s money. At one point, they intended to also create an indoor ski lift to help people practice getting on and off, but it’s unclear if they ever did.

Ski Houston didn’t invent the idea. Ray Hall opened something similar called a Ski-Dek in Rockaway, New Jersey, which was profiled in a 1961 Sports Illustrated story. By the 1980’s, the device was becoming very widespread, particularly in places like Houston where skiing was a novelty. Sun & Ski Sports locations all over the city had infinity slopes. However, the popularity declined in the 2000’s. While novel, the slopes were extremely basic and had little to offer besides teaching skiing fundamentals.

Another downside to the Ski Houston model was that it barely resembled snowy mountain sporting. Six Flags Astroworld tried to rectify that. From 1988 to 1997, they hosted Holiday in the Park around Christmas. One consistent element was an artificial snow hill that visitors could (very) briefly ski down. 

Astroworld tried. It really did. Between the winter temperatures and the ersatz Hofheinzberg mountain looming over the park, a little kid could pretend that Houston was actually transformed into a real ski resort. Unfortunately, the above-freezing temperatures and low height of the ski slope made it barely better than an elaborate slide, particularly with novices unused to skis who spent most of the trip down on their backsides. 

For a while, it looked like this model of skiing might be making a comeback in Houston. An ambitious proposed skiing and winter sports-themed indoor attraction called Southern Snow Park was announced in 2021, though there has been no new information since then and the official website is now a dead link. With climbing temperatures in the city making it attractive to indoor parks like Great Wolf Lodge now, it is possible that some company will finally complete the indoor skiing dream.

Ironically, global warming has led to a small outbreak of actual skiing in Houston. As the glaciers of the north shrink, the polar vortex increasingly escapes and shoots down to Texas. This led to several major freezes in Houston, most notably during Winter Storm Uri in 2021 that shut down most of the city.

Houston has a proud tradition of making sport in natural disasters, though, from fishing the floodwaters outside a Whataburger to tubing down rivers that were once roads. In 2021, at least four different people took up skiing on the highways during the freeze. The most notable was Travis McGullam, an avid skier who went viral for his video of him being towed by a friend’s truck on I-10 while sipping a beverage in one hand. 

What McGullam did was extremely dangerous but is also the kind of activity that is becoming increasingly common as Houston continues to experience more severe freezes and snowfall during the winter. The hill in Hermann Park is probably the most famous publicly accessible high point in the city, and every time there is snow, hundreds of people make their way over to sled or ski it.  It’s not yet predictable enough to build a competitive scene around, but if climate change continues producing snow days in Houston, the city is going to find a way to ski. One way or another, a form of skiing has been happening in Houston for 50 years.