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.
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, the longest-service state climatologist in history.
Although snow is driven by surrounding weather patterns, many factors influence how much snow falls, including location, elevation, moisture and wind, Robinson said. Total inches can vary dramatically from location to location, even within 100 feet.
How snowfall is measured
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. “They’re within the ballpark usually, but at the same time, they’re trying to bring in more people.”
Robinson recalls reading annual snowfall amounts collected from resorts in the Pennsylvania, New York and New Jersey region. “You could tell the resorts that inflated their totals versus the ones that were really legitimately accurate,” he 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. It happened during the winter of 1998-1999, when a prolific snowfall season at the Mount Baker Ski Area in northern Washington State produced an eye-popping 1,140 inches of snow.
After the annual total at the resort was reported, the National Weather Service convened a panel to study the data collection procedures used at that location. The committee ultimately accepted the results as official, handing Mount Baker – in Washington’s Cascade Mountains – the world record for snowfall in a single season and the unofficial title of snowiest mountain in the United States.
Which other mountains are the snowiest?
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.
- Easy Pass, on Mount Baker, elevation 5,270 feet – 89.5 inches.
- Lower Lassen Peak, California, elevation 8,250 feet – 78.9 inches.
- Paradise, Mount Rainier National Park, Washington, elevation 5,130 feet – 69.5 inches.
- Brown Top, North Cascades National Park, Washington – 64 inches.
- Swift Creek, Sumas Mountain, Skamania, Washington, elevation 4,440 – 63.8 inches.
- Mirror Lake, Wallowa Mountains, Swift Peak, Washington, elevation 8,120 feet – 63.4 inches.
- Marten Ridge, Mount Baker, Washington, elevation 3,520 feet – 58.4 inches.
- Lyman Lake, Wenatchee National Forest, near Chiwawa Peak, Washington, elevation 5,980 feet – 58.3 inches
- Nooksack, Washington, elevation 4,970 feet – 57.7 inches.
- Crater Lake, Klamath, Oregon, elevation 6,570 feet – 57.5 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. That makes the short distance to the Pacific Ocean a big factor in the prolific snow in the Pacific Northwest, home to several of the nation’s snowiest mountains.
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. That process also leaves less water density in the snow storms that move into Utah, providing more of the powdery snow prized by skiers.
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. Mountain resorts in the Lake Tahoe region, such as Mammoth, Sugar Bowl and Palisades, also are known for really deep snow, thanks to their proximity to the Pacific and their elevation.
Utah’s Wasatch Mountains enjoy a kind of unique snowy climate, Robinson said. Park City visitors can thank the Great Salt Lake for the famous snow fall on nearby slopes, he said. Resorts in the region near Salt Lake City reportedly average 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,” he said. “Along the Rockies and Utah’s Wasatch mountains, you get that powder people just die for.”
By contrast, snow in the northwest is often deep and very wet, which makes it heavier and more resistant to the movement of skis. “You’re going to get more bang for your buck with drier snow,” he said.
East of the Rockies, Mount Washington in New Hampshire, known for its weather extremes, reports a long-term average of about 281 inches of snow per year, according to the weather staff at the Mount Washington Observatory.
In Western New York, a 2,100-square-mile area known as Tug Hill, “almost always” receives more than 200 inches of snow in a season, according to the Tug Hill Commission. A high plateau rather than a literal hill, Robinson said its elevation, which reaches as high as 2,100 feet, provides “just enough lift to squeeze more moisture” out of systems blowing over Lake Ontario.
North Carolina’s Mount Mitchell, highest point east of the Mississippi River, has the elevation but not the massive water bodies that help pump up the snow totals in other regions. According to the North Carolina State Climate Office, it averages about 89 inches a year.
Dinah Voyles Pulver covers climate change and the environment for USA TODAY. She’s written about hurricanes, tornadoes and violent weather for more than 30 years. Reach her at [email protected] or @dinahvp on Bluesky or X.
