Snowmaking Underway in Australia With 2026 Season Start A Fortnight Away
Snowmaking Underway in Australia With 2026 Season Start A Fortnight Away
Published : 20-May-2026 09:12
As temperatures dropped to -1.4C overnight, snowmakers at Australia's largest resort, Perisher, made their first snow of the year. It comes as the resort recognises a major milestone: 20 years of automated snowmaking technology, which has seen snowmaking evolve from manually adjusted air and water snow guns to a largely automated system, helping provide more reliable early season cover and better conditions in high-traffic areas across the resort.
"In the early days of snowmaking the process of firing and adjusting air/water mixture settings on the snow guns was all done manually. Continual improvements and investment from Perisher on our snowmaking system over the last 20 years has resulted in us now having the majority of our snowmaking terrain covered with automated guns," explains Perisher's Director of Mountain Operations Andrew Kennedy, who has been there from the beginning.
These guns (either lances or fans) are able to regulate their output as required to either maximise snow productivity for early season base building or be set to provide a nice dry fresh layer for an optimal skiing surface.
For Perisher's snowmakers, the resort runs swing and graveyard snowmaking shifts from 4pm to midnight and midnight to 8am, allowing the team to take advantage of suitable evening and early morning conditions, and as technology has improved, automated guns have helped Perisher's snowmaking team respond more precisely to changing conditions across the mountain.
"Temperatures are always varying between the top of the mountain and the valley floor so the automated guns can be adjusted to enable maximum production as the temperature fluctuates. With the old manual guns, you were reliant on a snowmaker making manual adjustments at the gun itself. Each time they would ride around doing a gun check and this manual process could mean missing production opportunities," says Andrew, adding, "Snowmaking provides a level of snow cover certainty for our guests."
Australia's season is expected to start on Friday, June 5th, the start of a long holiday weekend in the country to celebrate the birthday of King Charles III.
The country has had several natural snowfalls over the past month and light snow ios forecast on high terrain this week but usually relies on snowmaking in the early season. A number of resorts including Mt Buller, Thredbo (pictured below last week) and Corin Forest now have all-weather snowmaking machines to include snow cover certainty.
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