For winter dreams 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.
The “snowiest” label could depend on whether you’re talking about where the most snow falls or where the most snow piles up on the ground. 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.
“Some ski resorts use less rigorous standards to measure and report snow,” Robinson said. “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, trying to bring in more people.”
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.
Twenty years of data from the National Water and Climate Center with the U.S. Department of Agriculture offers a glimpse at the western mountains in the lower 48 states with the most snow on average between 1991 and 2020. These results use the scientific standard known as the snow water equivalent, where a core sample is taken from the snow, then melted, then measured. That produces much lower numbers than the Mount Baker record, which tracked the actual depth of snow that fell.
Some of the top snowiest mountains in the continental US include the western mountains, with Easy Pass on Mount Baker in Washington, elevation 5,270 feet, reporting an average of 89.5 inches; Lower Lassen Peak in California, elevation 8,250 feet, reporting an average of 78.9 inches, and Paradise on Mount Rainier National Park in Washington, elevation 5,130 feet, reporting an average of 69.5 inches.
Why are mountains in Washington and Oregon the snowiest in the continental US? One of the main contributors to big snow is proximity to water, Robinson said. The short distance to the Pacific Ocean is a big factor in the prolific snow in the Pacific Northwest. The mountains in the Cascades and the Sierra Nevada, known as maritime snow climates, wring moisture out of storms that move in off the ocean and efficiently convert it into snow, Robinson said.
