Winter Xinjiang Travel: Skiing, Ice Festivals & Frozen Lakes
My phone died at minus 31°C outside Koktokay in January 2023. Fully charged, in my inside jacket pocket, and it still shut down when I pulled it out to shoot a frozen waterfall. That is the temperature at which winter in northern Xinjiang stops being a photogenic idea and becomes a logistics problem you have to solve properly.
It is also, without much competition, the most interesting time of year to be here. The tourist volume collapses to something like a tenth of the summer figure, prices halve outside the ski resorts, and the landscape turns into something you genuinely cannot see anywhere else in China.
The Case for Altay: Skiing Where Skiing Started
In a cave at Dundebulake in the Altai Mountains there is a rock painting of figures on skis, driving game downhill, holding single poles. Chinese and international researchers have dated it to roughly 10,000 years old, and on that basis the Altay Prefecture claims to be the birthplace of skiing. The claim is contested, as these things always are. What is not contested is that Tuvan and Kazakh herders in the Kanas area were still using handmade skis faced with horse hide well into living memory, and a few still make them.
The hide runs one way. Going uphill, the hair catches and grips; going down, it lies flat and slides. It is the same principle as a modern climbing skin and it predates the modern version by several thousand years. I watched a man in Hemu demonstrate a pair in 2023 — he went up a 20-degree slope without a single kick-turn and came down in a controlled skid with one long pole used as a rudder and a brake.
The Resorts
Koktokay International Ski Resort, in Fuyun County, is the serious one. Big vertical, genuine dry powder, and a season that runs from around mid-November into May in good years — long enough that Chinese national teams train there in spring. It is also brutally cold. January regularly sits below minus 30°C and Fuyun holds some of the lowest temperatures ever recorded in China.
Jiangjun Mountain, on the edge of Altay city, is the convenient one. You can be on the lift 25 minutes after leaving your hotel, which makes it a good first or last day. Terrain is moderate and it gets busy at weekends.
Silk Road International Resort in the Nanshan area, about an hour from Urumqi, is the accessible one. Fine snow, easy logistics, and a good option if you are transiting through the capital and want a day.
Lift passes ran ¥300 to ¥500 a day in the 2023 season, full rental packages ¥200 to ¥350. Lessons in English are limited outside the larger resorts; book ahead if you need one. A structured week that strings Urumqi, Altay and Koktokay together is laid out in our seven-day Altai ski itinerary.
Frozen Lakes
Sayram Lake
This is the winter image I would put above everything else in Xinjiang. Sayram sits at 2,073 metres and freezes hard, typically completing its ice cover somewhere in December or January and holding until late March or April. What makes it worth the trip is not that it is frozen but how it freezes.
Pressure ridges push up along fault lines in the ice, throwing up slabs a metre thick that go translucent blue at the broken edges. Methane and air bubbles get caught mid-rise and freeze in vertical stacks under a clear surface, so you can walk over what looks like a column of glass beads suspended below your boots. On a still day the ice booms — a low resonant crack that travels for what sounds like a kilometre.
Practical realities. The lake road is kept open but conditions vary and the wind on the ice can take an already low temperature and make it unbearable. I have measured minus 24°C air with wind that made it feel far worse. Walking on lake ice carries obvious risk; stay where local people are walking and do not wander towards inflow areas. Guesthouses around the lake mostly shut, so base in Bole or drive out from Yining. Access and the road situation are covered in our Sayram Lake guide.
Ulungur Lake and the Winter Fishing Festival
Ulungur, in Fuhai County, is a large shallow lake that produces a genuinely extraordinary event each winter. Teams cut holes through ice around half a metre thick, thread a net several hundred metres long beneath the surface using poles pushed hole to hole, and then haul it out with a winch and horses. Fish come up through the hole in a mass.
The first fish of the haul is auctioned and the prices are theatrical — six figures in some years, bought for the publicity as much as the fish. The festival typically runs in late December or January, with the exact date announced only a few weeks out. Ask a Fuhai or Altay hotel to check for you.
What I remember is not the auction. It is the sound of eighty people and two horses working a winch on a frozen lake at minus 26°C, with steam coming off the water in the hole. Background on the lake itself is in our Ulungur Lake guide.
Bosten and Heavenly Lake
Bosten Lake near Korla freezes and is easier to reach than either of the above, with reed beds frozen into the ice that photograph well. Heavenly Lake outside Urumqi freezes solid and runs ice activities during the season — accessible, popular, and much more managed than the others.
Kanas and Hemu in Deep Winter
This is my favourite thing to do in Xinjiang and it is not for everyone.
Snow depth in the Kanas area runs one to two metres. Log houses in Hemu get buried to the eaves. Smoke sits in the valley at dawn in a way it never quite manages in autumn, because the air is colder and heavier, and the combination of white ground, black timber and blue-grey smoke at 09:00 is worth every bit of the discomfort.
Access changes completely in winter. Private cars cannot generally get into the Kanas core area once the road closes, so transport becomes snowmobiles, horse-drawn sledges, or resort shuttles depending on conditions and current arrangements. Prices are negotiated locally and change year to year; budget considerably more than the summer equivalent and confirm with your guesthouse before you commit to dates.
Guesthouses that stay open in Hemu through winter are a small subset of those open in September. Heating is stoves. Water can freeze. I have stayed in one where the bathroom was a separate building 15 metres across the snow, and that walk at 03:00 at minus 28°C is a memory I have not been able to delete.
Ice and Snow Festivals
Xinjiang’s winter tourism season formally opens with a regional festival, usually in December, and individual cities run their own events through to February.
Urumqi puts on ice sculpture and snow sculpture displays in its parks, with the Silk Road resort area hosting the largest of them. Altay and Fuyun run events tied to the ski season, including snow-town illuminations and traditional games. In Kazakh areas you will find horse racing on snow, kokpar played on frozen ground, and eagle hunting demonstrations — the last of these mostly in the Ili Valley and around Zhaosu.
The eagle hunting is worth explaining honestly. Golden eagle falconry is a real tradition among Kazakh and Kyrgyz communities here, and the winter demonstrations you can attend are partly genuine and partly performance for visitors. The birds are real, the handlers are real, and the hunting season is real. What you see at a festival is a display, not a hunt.
Turpan and the South in Winter
People forget the south. Turpan in January sits around minus 5 to plus 5°C — cold, but nothing like the north — and the Flaming Mountains under a dusting of snow are absurd in the best way. Kashgar runs a similar range. The old town in winter, with almost no tourists in it, is the version of Kashgar I would recommend to anyone who has been in summer and found it crowded.
The catch in the south is dust and haze. Winter inversions trap particulate over the Tarim Basin and visibility can be poor for days at a stretch. You take the empty streets and you accept the flat grey sky.
What This Actually Requires: Gear
I have seen people arrive in Altay in a ski jacket and trainers. Do not.
Boots. Rated to minus 30°C or better, one size up to allow thick socks and air. This is the single most important item and the one people cheap out on. Add insoles.
Layers. Merino base, mid fleece, heavy down, windproof shell. Four layers, not two thick ones.
Extremities. Mittens over gloves. A balaclava or a buff plus a hat that covers ears. At minus 30°C exposed skin becomes a problem within minutes in wind.
Batteries. Cold kills lithium. Camera batteries go in an inside pocket against your body and rotate. Carry a power bank, also inside. My phone dying at Koktokay happened despite an inside pocket, because the jacket was unzipped for twenty minutes while I was shooting.
Optics. Bring a microfibre and never breathe towards your viewfinder. Going from minus 30°C into a heated room fogs everything instantly and then freezes it when you go back out — put the camera in a sealed bag before you go inside and let it warm up slowly.
The full winter list, including the items I now consider non-negotiable, is in our seasonal packing guide.
Driving in Winter
Rental agencies in Urumqi and Altay fit winter tyres as standard from around November, but confirm it explicitly rather than assuming. Studded tyres are available in the north and worth requesting.
Roads get closed. The G217 Duku Highway is shut all winter. Mountain sections around Guozigou and the Ili passes close for hours or days after heavy snow, and the closure decision arrives without warning. Check road status the morning you drive, not the night before.
My rules, learned in a ditch outside Fuhai: never let the tank drop below half, always carry two litres of water and food for a day, and tell your guesthouse your route. Recovery on a rural road in January is not fast. Rental conditions, insurance and what to check at pickup are in our car rental guide.
Costs
Winter is the cheap season everywhere except at the ski resorts, where it is the peak season.
A decent hotel room in Urumqi that costs ¥450 in August runs ¥220 in January. Kashgar drops similarly. Scenic area tickets are discounted at many sites through the winter promotion period, sometimes heavily. Flights into Urumqi from eastern China in January are frequently half the July price.
Against that: ski passes and rentals, and the transport premium in the Kanas area. My ten-day winter trip in 2023, covering Urumqi, Altay, Koktokay, Kanas and Hemu, came to about ¥9,800 for one person including domestic flights, three ski days, and everything else. Take out the skiing and it would have been closer to ¥6,000.
A Ten-Day Winter Route
Day one, arrive Urumqi. Day two, Heavenly Lake or the Silk Road resort for a warm-up ski. Day three, fly to Altay. Day four, ski Jiangjun Mountain. Days five and six, drive to Fuyun and ski Koktokay, with the frozen canyon in the afternoon. Day seven, transfer towards Burqin and Kanas. Days eight and nine, Kanas and Hemu with a dawn shoot each morning. Day ten, fly out from Kanas or Altay.
If Ulungur’s fishing festival falls inside your window, insert a day at Fuhai between Altay and Burqin. It is the best single day in the whole itinerary.
The phone came back to life an hour later on the hotel radiator, with two photographs of the frozen waterfall on it, both mediocre. What I actually kept from that morning was standing in a granite canyon at minus 31°C, listening to a river still running somewhere under two feet of ice, with nobody else within a kilometre. Summer Xinjiang cannot offer that at any price.