Deep in the remote mountains of western New Guinea — in one of the only places in equatorial Southeast Asia where snow has ever existed — there are persistent stories of a tiny glacier ski area that may once have operated beneath the glaciers of Puncak Jaya, Indonesia.
And almost nobody knows whether it was real.
For weeks, we searched for information on what may be one of the strangest ski resort stories on Earth: a supposed ski area hidden high in Indonesia’s Maoke Mountains near Puncak Jaya, the tallest mountain between the Himalayas and the Andes. Despite extensive digging, almost no verifiable documentation exists. Most references trace back to old forum posts, fragmented translations, and repeated retellings on obscure ski websites.
Still, the details are oddly specific.
The alleged resort was said to sit near the Meren Glacier at elevations between roughly 14,500 and 15,700 feet, in the shadow of 16,024-foot Puncak Jaya — also known as Carstensz Pyramid. The mountain once contained several glaciers, including the Carstensz Glacier, Northwall Firn, Southwall Hanging Glacier, and Meren Glacier. Today, however, nearly all of that ice has either dramatically shrunk or disappeared entirely.
Scientists have repeatedly warned that Indonesia’s glaciers — among the only tropical glaciers on Earth — are vanishing at an alarming pace. NASA and climate researchers estimate the remaining ice on Puncak Jaya could disappear entirely within the next few years.
That makes the possibility of a ski area there feel almost surreal.
According to the old reports, the resort allegedly operated with two platter lifts and a rope tow installed on the glacier in the early 1980s. The slopes reportedly consisted mostly of beginner and intermediate terrain, with a handful of mogul runs near the rope tow and freeride terrain accessible on nearby glaciers. One account even claimed skiers could descend more than 2,000 vertical feet during especially snowy winters.
The writings describe an isolated operation dependent on helicopters to transport lift components through dense rainforest and rugged alpine terrain. The climate descriptions are plausible enough: dry conditions from roughly May through October, with heavy monsoonal snowfall and storms during the wet season.
But there is one major problem.
There is no hard evidence the resort ever existed.
No confirmed photographs of the lifts. No archived trail maps. No official tourism records. No newspaper coverage from the era. Nothing concrete.
The central figure in the story is a man identified as “Sir John McCisk,” an alleged Scottish skier from Edinburgh who supposedly founded the ski area after climbing Puncak Jaya in 1977. According to the story, he dreamed of creating his own ski resort and completed the area in 1982 with help from Japanese technicians and used ski equipment imported from Japan.
The tale grows increasingly difficult to verify from there. Some sections read almost like translated tourism brochures, while others resemble internet folklore. At one point, the narrative claims McCisk hoped to eventually install a secondhand double chairlift sourced from a struggling Japanese ski resort sometime between 2010 and 2015.
Whether any of this actually happened remains unclear.
What is undeniably real, however, is that skiing in Indonesia was at least geographically possible. Puncak Jaya’s glaciers historically received snowfall year-round due to their extreme elevation near the equator. Mountaineers have documented snowstorms and freezing temperatures on the mountain for decades. In the 20th century, the glaciers were large enough that skiing on them would not have been unimaginable.
Today, though, the glaciers are dying fast.
Satellite imagery shows dramatic ice retreat over the last several decades. Nearby Puncak Trikora lost its ice cap entirely sometime between the 1950s and 1960s. The remaining glaciers on Puncak Jaya are now among the fastest-melting tropical glaciers on Earth.
If a ski area really did exist there — even briefly — it would now be impossible to recreate.
And perhaps that is part of why the story continues to fascinate skiers online. The idea that there may once have been a tiny ski resort hidden in the jungles of Indonesia feels almost too strange to be true. Yet in a rapidly warming world, even the most improbable ski stories can disappear before they are fully documented.
Maybe the resort was real. Maybe it was internet mythmaking long before social media existed. Either way, the glaciers themselves are disappearing, taking the possibility of tropical skiing in Indonesia with them.
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