Mount Baw Baw
Mount Baw Baw is a ski area in Australia, at about 1,520 m. Its mapped area is about 2.5 km across, with 23 marked runs and 8 lifts (about 5.6 km of piste in all).
Over the last twelve winters the ERA5 weather model gives it 46 cm of snowfall a season, 2,841st (tied) of 3,069 worldwide and 9th in Australia. It swings a lot from year to year: the biggest winter, 2017 (87 cm), brought more than 9 times as much as the leanest, 2015 (9 cm). Snowfall days average −1.6 °C at mid-mountain, close to freezing, so the snow is often heavy, and its snow-quality score ranks 8th of 10 in Australia.
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
Powder Score v1.0.0
7-day outlook
| Date | Snow | Temp | Wind |
|---|---|---|---|
| 🌤️ 8 Oct | 0 | -2.6 / 15.2 | 8 |
| ☁️ 9 Oct | 0 | -0.5 / 15.6 | 18 |
| 🌦️ 10 Oct | 0 | 2.2 / 12.3 | 18.9 |
| ☁️ 11 Oct | 0 | -0.2 / 13 | 14.9 |
| 🌧️ 12 Oct | 0 | 2.5 / 8.8 | 20.5 |
| ❄️ 13 Oct | 1.7 | -4.3 / 2.9 | 16.2 |
| ❄️ 14 Oct | 4.6 | -5.1 / -0.5 | 12.4 |
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.
Run map
The shape of the mountain
Which way the slopes face
Only 10% of the vertical on the runs descends to the north or east. More of the terrain faces the sun.
By difficulty
Lift types
- T-bar3
- Magic carpet3
- Platter2
See past trail maps on Skimap.org ↗
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 3,069 ski areas by one identical method. These are not the resort’s own published figures.
The tick marks the median across every Japanese ski area we measure. 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.
When it falls, and how winters differ
Month by month
Month by month, the most snow falls in August. September brings as much as July, or more. In amount, September brings 11 cm, less than the median of 23 cm.
Winter by winter
Across the 12 winters measured, the average is 46 cm, and 6 of them fell short of it. The leanest was 2015 with 9 cm; the biggest was 2017 with 87 cm (9.7 times as much). For 70% of the 10 ski areas in Australia, the leanest winter was the same 2015: bad winters tend to hit a whole region at once.
Snowfall each winter (June–September total). The dashed line is the average; the numbers mark the leanest and the biggest winter.
Map
Where it sits relative to nearby resorts. For a piste map, see the official site.
More places to look
Guides covering Australia
- Australia Just Had Its Worst Season in Twenty Years. Here Is What Japan's 12-Winter Record Says About Booking It Instead. Snow depth at Spencers Creek peaked at 94.5 cm, the third lowest since 1954, and resorts closed in August. Our own measure — snowfall, not depth — puts Australia at 50% of its 12-year average. The gap between those two numbers is the story: it was the warmth, not only the lack of snow. New Zealand, meanwhile, finished at 108% of normal.
- Where Is the Driest Snow in the Southern Hemisphere? We extended our snow-quality measurement to all 59 ski areas below the equator. The high Andes are drier than most of Japan. New Zealand and Australia get rain on a third of winter days. And the southern hemisphere's snowiest resorts are mostly not its best ones.
- Is Japan's Snow Really Better Than Australia's? Mostly, It Is the Rain We measured snow quality at 456 ski areas. All ten Australian ones land in the bottom 70. Perisher is 388th and Niseko is 38th — a far wider gap than the snowfall figures suggest, and it is made of rain.
Updated: 8 Oct 2026, 00:52