The Silk Road ski resort is just over an hour and 50km from downtown Urumqi and its easily accessible airport. Urumqi is Xinjiang’s capital city of over 3 million people and it offers an ethnic experience that is defined more by the Muslim customs of Central Asia than traditional Chinese culture. The resort is fairly basic with a ski shop, rental facility, restaurants and limited lodging. The terrain seemed decent and steep with enough snow. We were there in early April and all of the trails were fully covered with the base just beginning to melt out in the strong Xinjiang sunshine. The chairlift here runs to about 2000 meters with the larger backcountry peaks rising to 2800 meters. Overall we found this to be a pleasant experience but getting to Xinjiang is more complicated than visiting a ski resort in northeast China. If skiers make it this far into Xinjiang they might as well put in the effort and get to Altay for the real deal. This might change with the development of the projected Ping Tian resort a few miles away from the Silk Road resort. Ping Tian was originally proclaimed to be China’s first world-class ski resort but the project has been delayed.
See more about the Ping Tian development here:
http://www.skichina.com/other-resorts-and-rumors/
The Silk Road Ski Resort Urumqi Xinjiang China
The lodge and restaurant before opening
Rental options
The best tuner in China
The peaks around the resort were bigger and looked like fun backcountry options
mr li - i went to silkroad ski resort in july. first impressions of the resort was good nice tropical resturant. thats where all the good points end. the hotel rooms smell of sewage. so does the resturant toilets. the maid cleaning in the rooms vertualy does not exist often the room was not cleaned and i had to complain to get even the towels changed. activity ???????? well i was shocked you could say there is more to do in the local park where i live than there is in the resort. all the food served in the 3 or 4 resturants is the same so i hope you like muslim food because thats about all you will get. scenery around the hotel is nice but its being spoiled as there is a big building site building houses etc righ next to the resort. basicaly you will find it hard to keep yourself happy at the resort for more than 2 hours. definatly not worth the money to go there. and i would not recomend the resort to any of my friends. i will not be going back there again thats for sure
Steve Mcneil - I’ve skied there a couple of times of those times I picked my days and skiing the powder was pretty dam good. Take your helmet they won’t let you on the lift that takes you up the back mountains with out one. Yeah no “apres skiing” I stay 5 minutes down the road cheaper than staying up in the resort. I’ve never had a problem getting to Urumqi from Beijing(3 hour flight) or Guangzhou take you another day to get to Altay. Ps there is far better backcountry skiing in the Tian Shan mountain range.