Resort Reports · Issue No. 312 · Week of December 9, 2025
Filed from the lift line — 312 resort reports, 27 countries, this season.
Every dispatch below is written from the chair, the traverse, or the skin track — not from a tourism board. Riders first, always.
Latest filed reports
This week, from the lift line.
A regional index of the most recent on-snow dispatches. Each row opens to a full report with conditions, terrain notes, RDC ride logs, and getting-there intel.
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British Columbia interior — 41 cm new, cold smoke still holding in the trees.
Revelstoke, Kicking Horse, Whitewater. High-pressure window closing Tuesday; expect tracked-out bowls by Thursday.
RDC 8.1 -
The Alps — storm cycle winding down, freeride zones reset across the Trois Vallées.
Laax, Verbier, Val Thorens. North faces loaded, watch for wind slab on the south aspects above 2,400 m.
RDC 7.6 -
Hokkaido — JAPOW season opens wide across Niseko, Furano, and the Kiroro sidecountry.
Light, dry, deep. Gate policy relaxed at Hirafu; locals still hammering the inbound trees before 09:00.
RDC 9.2 -
Patagonia shoulder season — Las Leñas, Cerro Castor, Chapelco on low tide.
Limited terrain open, spring coverage thin. Worth knowing if you're booking the southern hemisphere swing.
RDC 5.4
This week's featured resort
Jackson Hole, Wyoming — 38 inches in 72 hours, 14 lifts tracked.
The most consequential storm cycle of the early season closed out last week. We logged four consecutive days on the mountain to file this dispatch.
- New snow (72 hr)
- 38 in / 96 cm
- Base depth
- 71 in / 180 cm
- Lifts tracked
- 14 of 13 (Sublette chair added)
- RDC ride log
- 4 days · 18 descents
Terrain breakdown
The south-facing load-outs off Thunder and the Sublette saddle set up cleanest by day three. North aspects in the Casper bowl held cold smoke all week, but the buried sun crust from the November warm spell is sitting roughly 60 cm down — crack it and you'll know it.
Getting there
Direct into Jackson (JAC) on Delta, United, and American. Rental car is non-negotiable — the local shuttle does not reach Teton Village before 7:30 a.m., and the first tram is the difference between first tracks and tracked.
The state of coverage, right now
Live from the field desk.
All figures compiled from internal field logs. Average filed report: 2,100 words, 11 on-snow photographs, dated ride log.
Rating methodology
Why our reports don't use stars.
The "Real Day Count" — RDC — is the rating system we built in 2017 to replace the vague five-star scales that dominate resort coverage. An RDC score is not a feeling. It is a number.
The math is simple and unkind: every report we publish carries a dated ride log — what board we rode, who rode it, how many lift cycles, how many descents, and what the conditions actually did on that day. The RDC score is the average of those days, weighted by terrain difficulty, weather severity, and how many of the descents were done under expert supervision. A score of 7.4 means our team logged nine solid days across the conditions window. A score of 9.2 means something rare happened — Hokkaido last week, for instance.
This matters because a four-star rating on a generic resort aggregator can mean anything. It can mean "we skied it once on a bluebird Saturday and the lodge had a decent espresso." It cannot tell you whether the trees were skiable, whether the cat track was a death march, or whether the lift line ate your morning.
Every RDC-rated report on this page is signed by a writer who holds at minimum an AASI Level 1 snowboard certification, and 71% are signed by writers who also hold an AIARE Level 1 or higher avalanche credential. We do not publish a resort report from a desk. We do not pad a review with SEO filler. We do not invent conditions 36 hours in advance.
When you read an RDC score on Snowboarder, you are reading a number that was earned on a board, in the snow, with a date attached. That is the entire difference.
Weekly dispatch
Get the next filed report before you hit the lift line.
One email each Tuesday. The fresh conditions, the new RDC ride logs, and what our 14-person editorial crew is riding that week. No roundups, no listicles, no filler.
— The Snowboarder Field Desk, Boulder, Colorado