Kaprun Piste Map

• Lechnerberg — in the village, and easy to miss on the mapTwo button lifts and two easy blue pistes right in the centre of Kaprun, with a children's area run by the local ski schools. On the sheet it is a small detail next to the town. In practice it is where a first-timer's first hour happens, and it is on the main lift pass.
• MK Maiskogelbahn — the gondola out of the village centreTwo stages, from the middle of Kaprun up the Maiskogel. This is the lift that changed the resort: before it existed there was no way onto the mountain from the town without wheels. It is also the way home — there is a valley run back down into Kaprun off the Maiskogel, and it is the only honest ski-in ski-out this village has.
• 3K K-onnection — the crossing, and the bit people do not expectA tri-cable gondola from the top of the Maiskogel across to Langwied on the Kitzsteinhorn. Look at where it sits on the sheet: it does not climb, it traverses, spanning the ground between two mountains that used to be a bus ride. It is the single line on this map that makes the column a column.
• The Gletscherjets — the ladder up the glacier itselfFrom Langwied the sheet stacks four numbered gondolas and cable cars in sequence — Gletscherjet 2, then 3, then 4, with the Langwiedbahn alongside and the Gipfelbahn and Gletschershuttle at the very top. There is also a second way in from the valley, the Gletscherjet 1 and Panoramabahn pair at the old road-end car park, which is the route you take by car.

There is no piste and no lift between the two. They share a printed sheet and a ticket, and you cross between them on the ski bus, which is free with a valid Ski ALPIN CARD during lift operating hours. Within Kaprun itself the buses are free for everybody, pass or no pass. We do not print times or frequencies anywhere on this site — they are reset every season — but the lift company publishes them and it is worth photographing the board on your first morning.

What matters is the direction. Somebody staying in Zell am See who wants the glacier has to bus towards the good snow every time they want it, which is why a lot of them go once and never again. From Kaprun the calculation is reversed: the glacier is above your bed and the Schmitten is an outing. You go to Zell am See for a change of scene, a tree line and a lake to look at, not because your own mountain has run out. That makes it a genuinely optional day rather than a chore, and it is the strongest argument for basing yourself on this side.

• The one who has never skiedLechnerberg on day one, at the bottom of the map and a walk from breakfast. Maiskogel from day two or three, which is long, gentle and a proper mountain rather than a practice field. Nothing on the glacier for the first week — not because it is hard, but because it is a six-stage ride to reach ground they could have found lower down.
• The confident intermediateThe glacier plateau, most mornings, and the Maiskogel run home in the afternoon. This is the party member the column suits best, because they can ride the whole chain, ski wide open ground at the top and still finish in the village on their own skis rather than in a gondola.
• The strong skierFind the Black Mamba and the lifts serving the terrain around it, and read the freeride routes off the top of the sheet. Be honest about the scale — this is two or three days of genuinely interesting skiing rather than six, and the answer to the back half of the week is the Schmitten across the valley or a guide and a bulletin.
• The one who is not skiing at allThe whole column works for them too, which is unusual. The summit gallery and restaurant are reachable on a sightseeing ticket, the Maisi Alm and the huts on the Maiskogel are reachable on the gondola, and the 23km of cross-country track in this valley are on a different map entirely. Nobody has to sit in the hotel.

A piste map is drawn in the summer and printed for a year, and everything that actually decides your day is missing from it. It will not tell you what is open — and on a resort with a season this long that is not a small omission. In October, most of what is drawn on this sheet is not running; the glacier is, and that is the holiday. The same applies in late spring at the other end.

It will not tell you what the weather is doing at your height, and here the drawing is at its most misleading, because a flat picture cannot show you that the top of it and the bottom of it are more than two vertical kilometres apart. The village under cloud with the glacier in sun above it is an ordinary Kaprun day. So is the reverse, with the summit shut in wind while the Maiskogel runs perfectly happily. Our webcam page exists for exactly that decision.

And it will not tell you how long anything takes. Distances on a piste map are drawn for legibility, not to scale, and the six stages between the village and the summit read as a short hop on paper. They are a real part of your morning, and the same drawing that flatters the climb also flattens the bus ride across to Zell am See.

Where this page comes from, so you can weigh it. The altitudes, the piste total, the lift count and the season dates are read live from our own resort record, which is why they agree with every other page in this guide and change in one place. The lift names, the ticket desks and the layout above Langwied were read off the lift company's own map and status pages in September 2026. What is not here is a first-hand season in Kaprun — our Austrian resort years were Söll, Mayrhofen and Kitzbühel — so the judgement on this page is a professional one about how ski areas are laid out, not a claim to have skied this particular sheet every winter. Where we do not hold a number, we have not printed one.