No snow yet. Snow depth and the seven-day outlook appear once snow is on the ground or forecast.
Typical snowfall
59cm
A weather-model figure, worked out the same way for every ski area, and lower than what actually falls. Use it to compare ski areas, not against the resort’s own totals. How we measure →
Elevation
350–428 m
Across
0.6 km
We do not show a snow depth here. The weather model we use reports snow lying on the ground — it knows nothing about grooming or snowmaking, and it is not the base depth a ski area publishes. In Japan we can check our figures against 234 weather stations. Outside Japan there is nothing to check them against, so we do not print a number we have not verified.
Bears Den Mountain, in United States, runs from 350 m at the base to 428 m at the top. Its mapped area is about 0.6 km across, with 12 marked runs and 3 lifts (about 2.7 km of piste in all).
Over the last twelve winters the ERA5 weather model gives it 59 cm of snowfall a season, 2,754th (tied) of 3,069 worldwide and 502nd in the United States. It swings a lot from year to year: the biggest winter, 2022/23 (119 cm), brought more than 4 times as much as the leanest, 2020/21 (26 cm). December brings as much snow as January here (21 and 10 cm on average).
How much snow it gets
Modelled from weather data the same way at all 3,069 ski areas we cover. These are not the resort’s own published figures.
Seasonal snowfall
59cm
per season
Worst of 12 winters
26cm
The middle winter of the 12: 51 cm. The best: 119 cm.
World rank
2754
of 3,069 worldwide
Rank in country
502
of 534 in United States
Elevation rank
341
Highest to lowest, of 534 in United States. The centre point sits at 395 m, 133 m below the national median.
Runs and lifts
Counted from the runs and lifts drawn on OpenStreetMap, within the boundary of the ski area. These are not the resort’s own published figures.
The figures are for the whole of “Thrill Hills”, which the map draws as one ski area.
Marked runs
12
Run length
2.7km
Lifts
3
Vertical
78m
Top 428 m · base 350 m
Run map
EasyIntermediateLift
North is up. Runs are coloured by difficulty; black lines are lifts.Slope shape, difficulty and lift types
The shape of the mountain
Longest run on the map0.5 km
Steepest pitch16°measured over at least 30 m
Average gradient of the runs10°
Which way the slopes face
North8%
East92%
South0%
West0%
100% of the vertical on the runs descends to the north or east. Those slopes get the least sun, so the snow lasts longer.
The most snow falls in December. March brings as much as January, or more. In amount, March brings 15 cm, less than the median of 30 cm.
21cmDec
10cmJan
12cmFeb
15cmMar
Average snowfall by month, last 12 winters
Winter by winter
Across the 12 winters measured, the average is 59 cm, and 7 of them fell short of it. The leanest was 2020/21 with 26 cm; the biggest was 2022/23 with 119 cm (4.6 times as much). For 33% of the 534 ski areas in the United States the leanest winter was 2015/16; here it was a different one.
Niseko is 526th in the world for snowfall. Zermatt is 554th, Jackson Hole 924th, Aspen 1,201st. Measured identically across 3,069 ski areas, the names everyone books and the places it actually snows turn out to be two different lists.