🇳🇿 New Zealand

Mount Cheeseman Ski Area

58 / 100 Powder Score
Good 🌨️ Official site

Mount Cheeseman Ski Area is a ski area in New Zealand. It sits at about 1,712 m above sea level. The mapped ski area covers about 1.3 km². Within 2 km of the centre, the map shows 34 marked runs and 3 lifts, totalling about 8.8 km of piste. 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. 1 official live camera is linked below. 10 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
-6.7℃
Max wind
8.9km/h
Elevation
1,712m
Area
1.3km²

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. Snow report on the official site ↗

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 -9.5 / 2.2 17.2
☁️ 28 Sept 0 -10.1 / -0.5 11.7
☁️ 29 Sept 0 -6.8 / 4.5 4.6
☁️ 30 Sept 0 -6.5 / 5.9 7.8
🌦️ 1 Oct 0 -5.1 / 7 7.5
☁️ 2 Oct 0 -0.5 / 8.1 13.1
☁️ 3 Oct 0 2.2 / 10.2 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
34
Run length
8.8km
Lifts
3
Vertical
305m
Top 1,854 m · base 1,550 m

Run map

NoviceEasyIntermediateAdvanced 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 map0.7 km
Steepest pitch36°measured over at least 30 m
Average gradient of the runs16.9°

Which way the slopes face

North 3%
East 75%
South 21%
West 0%

78% 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 1
Easy 4
Intermediate 15
Advanced 14

Lift types

  • T-bar2
  • Drag lift1

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

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

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
14
of 26 in New Zealand
Elevation rank
9
Highest to lowest, of 26 in New Zealand. The centre point sits at 1,712 m, 93 m above the national median.
Quality rank
18
of 25 in New Zealand
Temp when snowing
-3.2°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 0.37
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
Broken River Ski Area4.1 km136 cm1744
Craigieburn Valley Ski Area5.7 km136 cm1744
Mount Olympus Ski Area6.4 km145 cm1639
Porters Ski Area13 km127 cm1843
Temple Basin Ski Area28 km204 cm1043

When it falls, and how winters differ

Month by month

Month by month, the most snow falls in July. September brings 71% 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 29 cm, about the same as the median of 32 cm.

32cm
Jun
41cm
Jul
37cm
Aug
29cm
Sep
Average snowfall by month, last 12 winters

Map

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

Official piste map ↗

More places to look

Updated: 26 Sept 2026, 23:28

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