Study: Ski Areas Exaggerate Snowfall

And personally, I feel ski areas do exaggerate their snowfall totals, but I do also believe the study was flawed as geographic location can cause great differences between the resorts measurement and the government weather stations measurement.
 
Of course mountains exaggerate their snowfall. Some mountains are really bad about it (Jay is somewhat notorious for it). Plenty of times I see mountains put up their forecasted snowfall as their snowfall received, messed up.
 
I think the most interesting line was "Zinman estimates 10 to 15 percent of resorts are guilty of embellishing their numbers."

I would have expected close to 100 percent.
 
My dad and a few of my older relatives have told me that twenty years ago it was pretty common for smaller resorts to double or even triple their nightly snowfall in their reports to attract skiers. But the advent of webcams and the internet made increased accountability in snow reports.
 
Whatever. For the study to be accurate, they would have had to measure at the same places that the mountain was measuring. Any kid in a basic science class knows that.

Mountain measurements are often off anyways because of windloading, topography, and the presence of things like trees that change the way that snow gets layered and accumlates.

Generally, the numbers don't matter that much, it's more the classifications between different sizes of dumps. If they are exaggerating to get more people to the hill, that means that they stay funded and open, which I am just fine with.
 
Many times the snowfall isn't falsified, the ski area just chooses a spot that will accumulate snow very quickly and put their measuring stick there. It's a sneaky way of making it seem like the whole mountain has a ton of snow, when in reality is an area that catches wind blown snow.
 
i also love the trail number claims. in early season mt snow will claim like 20 trails and you go ski and there're about 4 lappable trails with a bunch of little connectors in between.

trails that never had upper and lower sections all of a sudden are counted as like "tippy top chute, slightly lower down chute but still pretty far up, getting closer to the bottom of chute, almost middle chute, mid chute, probably like 10 ft below mid chute, 3/4 chute but a little higher up than that, 3/4 chute, lower chute, bottom chute, runout to the lift...chute"
 
I personally think Schweitzer has one of the most honest and complete snow reports in the industry. Just sayin'.
 
thats exactly what i was going to post about too. ski resorts should really start using acres to describe how much is open
 
I know for a fact that skibowl on mt hood does. I just started working there and at our meetings they always talk about how much snow is actually there, its never what they claim on the website
 
well to start off with the only other resorts schweitzer has to compete with are literally half as big and quite literally flat. that means there is no real competition so they don't need to falsley advertise. Also i would agree, whenever i go up to schweitzer there is at least as much fresh snow as they reported, many times more. Lastly, the amount that they forecast is the exact same that NOAA forecasts, and lets be real, NOAA knows his shit...
 
haha yeah like went stowe went from claiming the "great 48" to 115 trails or something like that, without making any new trails. now everything has an upper, middle and lower part.
and on stowe's website they will never update their conditions page if they are not getting snow.... e.g. if they got a foot of snow on january 5th, they will "forget" to update their conditions page for 2 weeks or however long it takes until they get a storm again. pretty crafty haha
 
This year Mount snow is only saying acres that are skiable.

Because you cant change the size of an acre, unlike trails which you can say that a connector is a trail.
 
my home mountain does this like nobody's business. we have a few runs open with all man made snow and the rest of the mountain is basically bare. the upper mountain is listed as having a ten inch base. there is literally nothing
 
i think my mountain underexaggerates snowfall totals, because when they say 15" over night, and its nipples deep all day it makes me wonder
 
I'm talking about weather wise. I've heard great things about Schweitzer and would love to ski there once.
 
Arapahoe Basin UNDER exaggerates their snowfall. The people who measure it dip the stick around in different areas to find the least amount fallen, and report that. Pretty rad.

Beaver Creek snow reports are weird. Since big bad Vail is next door, I've heard rumors that they have to wait for Vail to report their snowfall before they can post up their numbers...which are usually more. (beaver creek typically receives more snow anyways...just cant brag about it too much)
 
At Alta last season, the numbers always seem like less than the actual amount. Like they would report like 14 inches, then I'm up there skiing like waist deep shnizz.
 
I doubt baker or kirkwood do this... seeing as that 1000+ inches per year seems pretty legit...

especially when there is so much base come april/may that there's still a 4 foot base come opening day the next year.
 
bestsnow.net this guy has been trying to get accurate info for a pritty long time great elnino la nina info too.
 
so true at Mount Snow. in actuality it will be long john to deer run and a few trails that branch off and reconnect.

and im not suprised by that story at all. especially at east coast mountains.
 
for got to put the rest of the story after reading that the next day they said sorry we put FT in instead of inc.
 
This.

I don't trust snow reports. Never really have. But It's not necessarily because the ski resort is embellishing the totals, but because of these before mentioned natural effects. But they're a good indicator for an ESTIMATED amount of snow that fell.
 
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