How much snow do you need to ski?

Every score on this site uses one bar: 30 cm of settled snow depth, on at least 3 of the 7 opening-week days, natural snow only. That is a choice, not a law of physics, and no governing body sets one. So this page does two things: it argues the choice, and then it tests it by re-scoring all 53 destinations across 10 seasons at 10, 20, 30, 50, 80 cm to show exactly how much the answer depends on where the bar sits.

Why 30 cm

A groomed piste needs enough settled depth to bury what is underneath it: rock, stumps, drainage, vegetation, the ruts left by summer machinery. Below roughly a third of a metre, that cover fails somewhere on the first traverse, and it fails first on the wind-scoured convex ground that skiers reach first. 30 cm is deliberately a modest bar. It is not asking whether it was a powder day. It is asking whether the mountain had a skiable natural base at all.

Two honest qualifications. Off-piste and touring want far more, because they have no grooming to redistribute what is there and no machinery to fill the gaps. And depth is not condition: 30 cm of settled spring crust and 30 cm of cold dry snow ski nothing alike. This threshold is a coverage test, not a quality test.

Stated plainly so you can disagree with it: 30 cm over 3 of 7 days is this site's editorial choice, applied identically to every destination with no exceptions and no adjustments. What follows is what happens if you pick differently.

What the test shows

Moving the bar moves the counts a long way and the leaders hardly at all. At 30 cm, 16 destinations score 8 or better and 13 score zero. Drop to 10 cm, a bar so low it means little more than a covering, and 27 clear 8 or better: far more names qualify, and the same names still lead. Raise it to 50 cm, which is a genuine early-season base rather than a strip, and 9 destinations still clear 8 out of 10 while 28 fall to zero.

The names that survive the hardest bar are the finding. 3 destinations hold a perfect 10-out-of-10 record even at 50 cm: Whistler Blackcomb, Portillo, Revelstoke. A conclusion that is stable across a fivefold change in the threshold is not an artefact of the threshold.

What depth still will not tell you

Whether it is any good. Depth says nothing about surface: wind can strip a slope back to ice while the recorded depth barely moves, a thaw and refreeze can turn half a metre into a skating rink, and fresh snow on a weak base is an avalanche problem rather than a good day. It also says nothing about whether the lifts are turning, which is an operating decision that no weather model can see.

For the current answer rather than the historical one, the Ski Meter scores today's conditions from live model data at both base and summit elevation with every point shown, and the methodology page sets out what the forecasts can and cannot do. For the question of how much of the early-season base is made rather than fallen, see what this index leaves out.