Selwyn Snow Resort has called an early end to its 2026 season, a day after Victoria's Mount Baw Baw did the same. Rain on Thursday stripped what was left of the snowpack, and the cold nights needed to rebuild it through snowmaking never arrived. It's a rough result for a resort that only just found its footing again after being burned to the ground in the 2019-20 Black Summer bushfires and a multi-year rebuild. Here's how the season fell apart, and where Selwyn's been since the fire.
Selwyn Snow Resort has closed for the rest of the 2026 season, becoming the second Australian resort in as many days to call an early finish after rain and warm nights stripped away what little snowpack remained.
The closure follows Victoria's Mount Baw Baw, which announced the end of its own 2026 lift operations a day earlier after a 57-day season. Between them, the two closures mark the start of what's shaping up as a below-average season across Australian resorts generally, with Selwyn becoming the first New South Wales resort to shut its doors for the year.
Selwyn had hoped to reopen this past weekend after closing temporarily when heavy rain hit on Thursday. The resort's team spent the intervening days trying to rebuild enough of a base through snowmaking to justify getting lifts turning again, but the cold temperatures that snowmaking depends on never showed up. In a statement, Selwyn said its "Mountain Team worked tirelessly to give us every possible chance of reopening," but that "the snowmaking temperatures we needed didn't arrive, and the time has come to call it a season." The resort described the decision as difficult after what it called a challenging winter overall.
A resort that's had more than its share of setbacks
Selwyn's 2026 season closing early is a particularly hard result given what the resort has been through to get back to reliable operation at all. It was destroyed in the Black Summer bushfires that swept through Kosciuszko National Park in the 2019-20 season, and had to be rebuilt from the ground up - a process further delayed by COVID-19. When it was finally ready to reopen in 2022, an early and unexpectedly heavy snowfall arrived before contractors could finish the electrical wiring, forcing the resort to stay closed through a season with excellent natural snow cover sitting unused on the mountain. Two more below-average seasons followed in 2023 and 2024, meaning Selwyn didn't get a real run at a full winter until 2025, which turned out to be a genuinely strong season for the resort. The early end to 2026 breaks that momentum for a small operation that has had very few uninterrupted seasons since the fire.
Selwyn's base facilities, the Selwyn Centre, will stay open through the weekend for food and drink, giving visitors one last chance to visit before winter operations wrap up for good. The resort thanked skiers, snowboarders, families and staff for their support through the season, citing everything from first days on snow to family trips, lessons, tobogganing and time spent in the Centre over a hot chocolate.
