Snowless in July: Australia's Historic Dry Start Gets Trolled by Japan

Australia's ski season has opened to bare paddocks, and someone in Japan noticed.

Entering July, the snow depth reading at Spencers Creek - the benchmark measurement Snowy Hydro has taken since 1954 - sat at zero centimetres. That makes it only the second time in 72 years of records that the site has carried no snow at all heading into the month. Resorts across the Snowies and the Victorian high country opened on schedule in early June, but a promising early season fall largely melted before the King's Birthday long weekend, and warm, humid nights since have made snowmaking difficult across the board.

It hasn't gone unnoticed overseas. A Japanese ski media account began circulating webcam images of Australia's brown, grassy slopes in the final days of June, with tongue-in-cheek commentary aimed at Australians considering a booking for their own winter next year. The images appear to have originated from a Myoko Kogen-linked account, though the exact source has been reported inconsistently across coverage - some outlets have credited "Myoko Tourism," others "Myoko Snow Resorts" - and SnowStash has not been able to independently confirm which account or entity posted the original images.

Why the season has started so badly

The Bureau of Meteorology declared an El Nino event on June 16, a pattern historically associated with drier, warmer conditions across eastern Australia's ski regions. That's lined up closely with what's actually happened on the ground - a run of above-average overnight temperatures through June kept slopes too warm for consistent snowmaking, even as resorts held terrain open using what natural cover remained.

A three-band weather system moving through in the final days of June brought early hope, but the first two bands arrived too warm, falling as rain rather than snow at resort elevation. A colder change was forecast to push through from Thursday, with modelling suggesting anywhere from 20 to 40 centimetres possible into the weekend - a potentially significant turnaround, though the season's fortunes will depend on what actually lands rather than what's forecast.

The trolling, and the bigger picture

The webcam-swapping moment is a genuinely funny bit of ski marketing opportunism - Myoko Kogen, a cluster of resorts beneath Mount Myoko in Niigata Prefecture, receives an average of 13 to 15 metres of snowfall a season and is home to Myoko Suginohara, which claims Japan's longest single run at 8.5 kilometres. Against that backdrop, a season-opening photo of bare Australian grass makes for easy content.

But a slow start isn't necessarily a bad omen. Historical data across 15 comparably slow-starting Australian seasons since 1954 shows an average peak snow depth of 179.2 centimetres, against a 195.9 centimetre average across all seasons in that record - meaning seasons that begin poorly have typically recovered to within roughly 8 per cent of a normal peak by the time they're finished. It's a reminder that a bare Spencers Creek reading in early July says relatively little about how August and September will play out.