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The heaviest snow since early July has fallen across the ski resorts of New South Wales and Victoria and the crowds didn’t miss it, with visitors turned away on the road to Australia’s largest ski resort Perisher on Saturday morning.
Perisher has so far received 32 centimetres of fresh snow in this storm, the highest amount of any Aussie resort, with totals of around 10 to 25 cm at most other resorts
The long-awaited first major blizzard of August 2023 began early on Friday and was on the forecasts all week, which explains the influx of snow-goers in what has thus far been a moderate season with crowds noticeably smaller on most days than in recent years.
However just before 10 am on Saturday morning, Perisher sent out phone notifications as well as an update on its website stating that its parking lot was full, with traffic being turned around on the Kosciuszko Road which leads to the resort from the nearby town of Jindabyne.
Fortunately for those with tickets to Perisher, access to the resort is still possible via the Skitube, a railway which runs through the mountain to both Perisher Valley and Blue Cow (another part of the resort) via the Alpine Way.
So one way or another, snow lovers have been able to get their snow fix this wintry Saturday.
Despite this, locals report the road from Jindabyne to Perisher was “like a car park” as early as 7am.
Meanwhile these snowfalls have been particularly good news for Australia’s smaller, lower-altitude resorts which have been struggling this winter.
Selwyn Snow Resort in NSW was effectively destroyed in the January 2020 Black Summer bushfires, which burned a third of Kosciuszko National Park.
Virtually all of the resorts’s infrastructure was wiped out in the fires, and rebuilt over the last three years, and the resort finally reopened in June 2023, only to close again in early August due to lack of snow.
The ski lifts and toboggan park are spinning again at Selwyn this Saturday, and the resort’s snow cams show that the crowds haven’t missed out on the action.
No significant snowfalls are on the horizon for Australia’s high country in the next week or so.
So while the snowfalls of recent days have freshened up the cover, they haven’t quite added enough to the base to turn a below-average snow season into a good one with spring fast approaching.
