Skeptics abound, of course. Can the next greatest place to ski in Europe really be in a tiny war-weary country so obscure it’s hard to imagine anyone vacationing there at all? Is a mega-resort the most sustainable way to attract tourists? Will they even find enough snow on a warming planet? Never mind Kosovo’s rampant corruption and politics that are so cantankerous that politicians themselves have lobbed tear gas canisters in their own chambers at least six times in the last few months to disrupt their own proceedings.

And yet there is hope.

“If we can do this, we can do anything,” said Manik Begolli, an Albanian Kosovar who worked on a public-private partnership team contracted by the United States Agency for International Development to help find an investor.

Maybe. For the moment, though, I just hoped I could ski.

Seven-Elevens have bigger parking lots than Brezovica’s but that’s where the Serbs dropped me off just after dark as the storm gathered intensity. Igor Nikolcevic met me there in a camouflage snowboard jacket. He was 42, a Serb with closely cropped hair and soulful eyes. He grabbed my ski bag and led me up an icy path to a pizzeria that he started with his wife, Draginja, and which he named after his daughter, Tina. Tina now lives in Pristina. I could have her room, fuzzy kitten posters and all.

I followed Igor into the heart of the village, a collection of mostly hand-built cottages run by hangers-on who have eked out a living by offering basic services to the few who make it this far. There was the Cafe Braca and Restaurant Ljuboten. Skis lined the racks in a shop called Dane. The main chairlift out of the village, an ancient double chair, stood eerily quiet, the seats glazed in ice.

“What time will the lifts start running?” I asked.

“You mean, if they start running,” Igor replied.

That was actually an improvement over the last time I was here, in 2013, when INEX was hundreds of thousands of euros behind on its power bill and the utility company had cut electricity to the lifts. All was not lost. Instead, for €7 — about $9 at the time — the Dane guys would give you a ride to the top in a snow-grooming machine, where an entire resort’s worth of untracked powder tugged at my tips.