🇳🇿 New Zealand

Mount Olympus Ski Area

62 / 100 Powder Score
Good 🌨️

Mount Olympus Ski Area is a ski area in New Zealand. It sits at about 1,670 m above sea level. The mapped ski area covers about 1.6 km². Within 2.5 km of the centre, the map shows 3 marked runs and 5 lifts, totalling about 1.3 km of piste. Over the last three winters the ERA5 reanalysis gives it 145 cm of snowfall a season, 1639th (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
8.1cm
Snow 48h
10.2cm
Next 24h
3.9cm
Next 72h
3.9cm
Temperature
-7.2℃
Max wind
8.4km/h
Elevation
1,670m
Area
1.6km²

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) 21.7/40
Forecast (24h) 8.1/25
Snow quality 20/20
Wind 10/10
Base 2/5

Powder Score v1.0.0

7-day outlook

Date Snow Temp Wind
🌧️ 27 Sept 12 -10 / 2 13
☁️ 28 Sept 0 -10.8 / -0.9 8.9
☁️ 29 Sept 0 -7.1 / 5 5.9
☁️ 30 Sept 0 -6 / 6.8 9.3
☁️ 1 Oct 0 -4.4 / 8 8.1
☁️ 2 Oct 0 0 / 8.4 14.4
☁️ 3 Oct 0 2.4 / 11 10.1

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
2
Run length
1.3km
Lifts
5
Vertical
349m
Top 1,814 m · base 1,465 m

Run map

Intermediate 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 pitch27°measured over at least 30 m
Average gradient of the runs14.9°

Which way the slopes face

North 0%
East 56%
South 37%
West 7%

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

Intermediate 2

Lift types

  • Drag lift5

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.

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
145 cm
per season
Range over three winters
61 cm
110–171 cm. The best winter was 1.6x the worst.
World rank
1639
of 3,112 worldwide
Rank in country
11
of 26 in New Zealand
Elevation rank
12
Highest to lowest, of 26 in New Zealand. The centre point sits at 1,670 m, 51 m above the national median.
Quality rank
13
of 25 in New Zealand
Temp when snowing
-3.4°C
Japanese median: -3.5°C
Rain days
31%
Japanese median: 16%
Days over 5 cm
6%
Japanese median: 15%
Wind when snowing
13 km/h
Dryness 0.39
Frequency 0.17
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
Mount Cheeseman Ski Area6.4 km136 cm1744
Porters Ski Area9.0 km127 cm1843
Broken River Ski Area10 km136 cm1744
Craigieburn Valley Ski Area12 km136 cm1744
Temple Basin Ski Area32 km204 cm1043

When it falls, and how winters differ

Month by month

Month by month, the most snow falls in July. September brings 62% 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.

36cm
Jun
50cm
Jul
41cm
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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