My story on ForbesTraveler.com today — “The Top 20 Snowiest Ski Resorts in the World” — honors the snow gods from Washington’s Mount Baker to Hokkaido, Japan, where the white stuff piles so deep some years that resort workers have to dig out chairlifts.
The story highlights the top 20 snowiest resorts on the planet, as tracked by Bestsnow.net, which pulls meteorological records from weather stations, data from avalanche-forecasting centers and monthly snowfall amounts from ski resorts.
Our list includes big boys like Snowbird as well as little-known mountains like Whitewater Resort in British Colombia, which is smothered each season under an average of 397 inches of snow. Alyeska Resort near Anchorage, Alaska, made the list with its yearly 513-inch figure, as did Kirkwood Mountain Resort (473 inches) and Boreal (395 inches), both near Lake Tahoe in California.
The deepest of all? That title goes to Mt. Baker Ski Area, a resort on the flanks of its namesake 10,778-foot stratovolcano in northern Washington State. Indeed, Baker once recorded a snow year so mythically deep that it’s regularly cited as the most snow measured anywhere, ever, on the planet.
Baker has always been known for its tremendous annual snowfall, but during the winter of 1998/99 the gloppy snow of the Pacific Northwest literally buried anything in local memory. By season’s end, Baker recorded 1,140 inches of snow — a near-apocalyptic 95 feet of the frozen white stuff. “It was a legendary year,” says Tony Crocker of Bestsnow.net.
Read the full story on “The Top 20 Snowiest Ski Resorts in the World” here: https://www.forbestraveler.com/skiing/snowiest-ski-resorts-story.html
