🇳🇿 New Zealand

Broken River Ski Area

58 / 100 Powder Score
Good 🌨️

Broken River Ski Area is a ski area in New Zealand. It sits at about 1,728 m above sea level. The mapped ski area covers about 2.0 km². Over the last three winters the ERA5 reanalysis gives it 136 cm of snowfall a season, 1744th (tied) of the 3,112 ski areas we measure worldwide. The model runs well below what resorts report, so the ranking is the meaningful part rather than the centimetre figure. 9 other ski areas lie within 120 km. Snow figures and the Powder Score are recalculated every day.

Snow 24h
7.1cm
Snow 48h
7.9cm
Next 24h
3.8cm
Next 72h
3.8cm
Temperature
-6.8℃
Max wind
8.9km/h
Elevation
1,728m
Area
2.0km²

Elevation of the ski area’s centre point, taken from a digital elevation model. It is not the base-to-summit range.

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.

Score breakdown

Fresh (48h) 18.2/40
Forecast (24h) 7.9/25
Snow quality 20/20
Wind 10/10
Base 2/5

Powder Score v1.0.0

7-day outlook

Date Snow Temp Wind
❄️ 27 Sept 10.9 -9.6 / 2.1 17.2
☁️ 28 Sept 0 -10.2 / -0.6 11.7
☁️ 29 Sept 0 -6.9 / 4.4 4.6
☁️ 30 Sept 0 -6.6 / 5.8 7.8
🌦️ 1 Oct 0 -5.2 / 6.9 7.5
☁️ 2 Oct 0 -0.6 / 8 13.1
☁️ 3 Oct 0 2.1 / 10.1 11.3

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.

Marked runs
21
Run length
9.9km
Lifts
10
Vertical
398m
Top 1,815 m · base 1,417 m

Run map

NoviceIntermediateAdvanced Lift
North is up. Runs are coloured by difficulty; black lines are lifts.
Run map

Drag to move around, and use + and − to zoom. On a phone, swipe to move and pinch to zoom in further.

The shape of the mountain

Longest run on the map0.9 km
Steepest pitch40°measured over at least 30 m
Average gradient of the runs20.6°

Which way the slopes face

North 3%
East 53%
South 43%
West 1%

56% of the vertical on the runs descends to the north or east. Those slopes get the least sun, so the snow lasts longer.

By difficulty

Novice 2
Intermediate 8
Advanced 11

Lift types

  • Drag lift6
  • Funicular4

See past trail maps on Skimap.org ↗

Source: OpenSkiMap (© OpenStreetMap contributors, ODbL 1.0). How finely ski areas are drawn varies by region, so treat the counts as indicative. Vertical is the difference between the highest and lowest points of the mapped runs and lifts.

Live Cameras

This ski area does not put a camera on its own slopes. What follows are nearby cameras, not the pistes themselves.

Footage remains the copyright of each operator. JAPANSNOWLINE neither stores nor redistributes it.

Some cameras here are provided by Windy.com. Footage plays in Windy’s own player; we do not store it. Windy.com

How much snow it gets

Measured by us across 3,112 ski areas by one identical method. These are not the resort’s own published figures.

Seasonal snowfall
136 cm
per season
Range over three winters
41 cm
112–153 cm. The best winter was 1.4x the worst.
World rank
1744
of 3,112 worldwide
Rank in country
12
of 26 in New Zealand
Elevation rank
7
Highest to lowest, of 26 in New Zealand. The centre point sits at 1,728 m, 109 m above the national median.
Quality rank
16
of 25 in New Zealand
Temp when snowing
-3.3°C
Japanese median: -3.5°C
Rain days
33%
Japanese median: 16%
Days over 5 cm
5%
Japanese median: 15%
Wind when snowing
14 km/h
Dryness 0.38
Frequency 0.14
Freedom from rain 0.35
Calm when snowing 1.00

The tick marks the median across the 395 Japanese ski areas. All four bars run the same way — longer is better.

The quality score deliberately excludes how much snow falls — it uses temperature, frequency, rain and wind. Snowing a lot and snowing well are different things.

Compared with what is nearby

Within 50 km straight line. Measured the same way, so the ranks compare directly. Ski areas a few kilometres apart share a weather grid cell and can return the same figure.

Ski areaDistanceSeasonal snowfallWorld rank
Craigieburn Valley Ski Area1.7 km136 cm1744
Mount Cheeseman Ski Area4.1 km136 cm1744
Mount Olympus Ski Area10 km145 cm1639
Porters Ski Area17 km127 cm1843
Temple Basin Ski Area25 km204 cm1043

When it falls, and how winters differ

Month by month

Month by month, the most snow falls in July. September brings 69% of July’s snowfall. That is a steeper fall than the median for ski areas in New Zealand (79%): the snow here is concentrated early in the season. In amount, September brings 31 cm, about the same as the median of 32 cm.

32cm
Jun
45cm
Jul
39cm
Aug
31cm
Sep
Average snowfall by month, last 12 winters

Map

Where it sits relative to nearby resorts. For a piste map, see the official site.

More places to look

Updated: 26 Sept 2026, 23:28

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