No snow yet. Snow depth and the seven-day outlook appear once snow is on the ground or forecast.
Typical snowfall
115cm
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
1,475–1,673 m
Across
1.1 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.
Cottonwood Butte Ski Hill, in United States, runs from 1,475 m at the base to 1,673 m at the top. Its mapped area is about 1.1 km across, with 6 marked runs and 1 lift (about 3.7 km of piste in all).
Over the last twelve winters the ERA5 weather model gives it 115 cm of snowfall a season, 2,167th (tied) of 3,069 worldwide and 332nd in the United States. It swings a lot from year to year: the biggest winter, 2016/17 (154 cm), brought more than twice as much as the leanest, 2014/15 (61 cm). December brings as much snow as January here (37 and 24 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
115cm
per season
Worst of 12 winters
61cm
The middle winter of the 12: 119 cm. The best: 154 cm.
World rank
2167
of 3,069 worldwide
Rank in country
332
of 534 in United States
Elevation rank
163
Highest to lowest, of 534 in United States. The centre point sits at 1,580 m, 1,052 m above the national median.
Compared with what is nearby
Within 50 km in a straight line. Ski areas in the same weather-model cell (about 30 km across) get the same figure.
The most snow falls in December. March brings 75% of January’s snowfall. That is a steeper fall than the median for ski areas in the United States (85%): the snow here is concentrated early in the season. In amount, March brings 18 cm, less than the median of 30 cm.
37cmDec
24cmJan
35cmFeb
18cmMar
Average snowfall by month, last 12 winters
Winter by winter
Across the 12 winters measured, the average is 115 cm, and 6 of them fell short of it. The leanest was 2014/15 with 61 cm; the biggest was 2016/17 with 154 cm (2.5 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.