No snow yet. Snow depth and the seven-day outlook appear once snow is on the ground or forecast.
Typical snowfall
188cm
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
1,136–1,156 m
Across
8.2 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.Snow report on the official site ↗
Palouse Divide Nordic Ski Area, in United States, runs from 1,136 m at the base to 1,156 m at the top. Its mapped area is about 8.2 km across, with 7 marked runs and 2 lifts (about 2.9 km of piste in all).
Over the last twelve winters the ERA5 weather model gives it 188 cm of snowfall a season, 1,259th (tied) of 3,069 worldwide and 105th in the United States. It swings a lot from year to year: the biggest winter, 2017/18 (263 cm), brought more than 3 times as much as the leanest, 2014/15 (79 cm). December brings as much snow as January here (64 and 44 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
188cm
per season
Worst of 12 winters
79cm
The middle winter of the 12: 195 cm. The best: 263 cm.
World rank
1259
of 3,069 worldwide
Rank in country
105
of 534 in United States
Elevation rank
187
Highest to lowest, of 534 in United States. The centre point sits at 1,141 m, 613 m above 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.
Marked runs
7
Run length
2.9km
Lifts
2
Vertical
20m
Top 1,156 m · base 1,136 m
Run map
NoviceEasyIntermediateAdvancedLift
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 map1.0 km
Steepest pitch26°measured over at least 30 m
Average gradient of the runs11.1°
Which way the slopes face
North58%
East23%
South10%
West10%
81% 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 70% 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 31 cm, about the same as the median of 30 cm.
64cmDec
44cmJan
48cmFeb
31cmMar
Average snowfall by month, last 12 winters
Winter by winter
Across the 12 winters measured, the average is 188 cm, and 6 of them fell short of it. The leanest was 2014/15 with 79 cm; the biggest was 2017/18 with 263 cm (3.3 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.