Winter Dreams of Skiing: Which Mountains are the Snowiest?
For those who dream of skiing down glistening white slopes and spending time in snow-covered lodges, big snowfall is a must. Ski resorts often market their locations as “the snowiest” in a state or region to lure visitors, but which mountains are really the snowiest? Answering that question is more complicated than you might think, experts told USA TODAY.
“You hear this storm gave us 2 inches or that one gave us 3 feet, but (snow) is one of the harder things to actually measure,” said Daniel McEvoy, associate research professor in climatology with the Western Regional Climate Center. Snow monitoring equipment isn’t always at the very highest elevations, McEvoy said, and snow simply isn’t measured at all on some hard-to-reach mountain peaks.
There’s also no one standard way to measure snow, said David Robinson, a professor in the geography department at Rutgers University and the New Jersey State Climatologist. Total inches can vary dramatically from location to location, even within 100 feet.
While many official reporting stations do monitor and measure snow in the same way, other locations, including some ski resorts, use less rigorous standards to measure and report snow. Weather experts tend to take some of those reports with “a grain of salt” because the measurements aren’t necessarily scientific and can sometimes be a bit inflated, McEvoy said.
To reliably compare snowfall from place to place, scientific measurements should be made the same way every day in each location, the experts said. Questions about the precise methods used at a given location to measure snow crop up from time to time when new records are set.
Mount Baker in Washington State holds the world record for snowfall in a single season, with an astonishing 1,140 inches of snow. However, when using the scientific standard of snow water equivalent, other mountains in the western United States stand out as the snowiest.
These include Easy Pass, Lower Lassen Peak, Paradise, Brown Top, Swift Creek, Mirror Lake, Marten Ridge, Lyman Lake, Nooksack, and Crater Lake, all located in Washington and Oregon. The proximity to water, particularly the Pacific Ocean, is a key factor in these mountains’ ability to produce heavy snowfall.
In contrast, the Sierra Nevada in California and the Cascades in Washington and Oregon see an average of anywhere from 400 to 600 actual inches of snow during the winter. Utah’s Wasatch Mountains, known for their unique snowy climate, also receive significant snowfall, with resorts in the region reportedly averaging around 500 inches of snowfall a year.
From a skier’s perspective, the snow on these slopes is often billed as the “best snow on Earth,” because it’s “deep and very, very light in density.” However, snow in the northwest is often deep and very wet, making it heavier and more resistant to the movement of skis.
East of the Rockies, Mount Washington in New Hampshire reports a long-term average of about 281 inches of snow per year, while Western New York’s Tug Hill region receives more than 200 inches of snow in a season. North Carolina’s Mount Mitchell, the highest point east of the Mississippi River, averages about 89 inches a year.