The four Aspen Snowmass snow stakes, and how to read what they show
At 19:06 Mountain time on 13 October the Snowmass snow stake was showing a bare board. Two columns of rungs marked 2, 6, 10, 14 and 18 inches, a wristwatch bolted between them, aspen trunks lit white behind it by the lamp, and nothing settled on any of it. For 13 October that is the right answer. The reason to open it now, months before anyone needs it, is that the board takes about a minute to learn and the number you read off it in January depends on something the picture never tells you.
The same board on all four mountains
Aspen Snowmass runs a stake on each of its mountains and they are built to one pattern: a vertical slatted board with two scales, the left column headed 24 HOUR TOTAL and the right one STORM TOTAL, both running 2 to 18 inches. The sponsor's watch sits in the middle of the frame, which is either charming or not depending on your view of watches.
- Aspen Mountain, the highest of the four at 11,200 ft. The 01:06 GMT frame I pulled had water beaded across the watch glass, so the board was wet rather than white.
- Aspen Highlands at 10,000 ft. This is the one that reads cleanest in the dark: both scales legible, conifers standing either side of the board, the mountain's name along the top.
- Buttermilk at 9,850 ft, the lowest of the four and so the likeliest to be taking rain while the others take snow. Its camera sits nearest its board, close enough that the lamp blows out the middle of the frame.
- Snowmass at 10,600 ft, the one in the aspen stand.
The elevations are the ones OpenSnow lists against each camera, read on 2026-10-14. All four rewrite their picture every five minutes, and all four were doing it when I checked: fetching the four upstream frames at 01:14 GMT on 2026-10-14 returned HTTP 200 with Last-Modified stamps of 01:06:26, 01:06:40, 01:08:08 and 01:06:24, so none was more than eight minutes old.
The clearing time is the whole trick
A snow stake is only a ruler. What makes a reading mean anything is when somebody last swept the board flat, and that time is not written on the Aspen boards. All four are cleared at 4pm.
Work out what that does to the reading. Open the Snowmass board at 7am after a storm and the 24 HOUR TOTAL column is counting from 4pm the previous afternoon, so it holds fifteen hours of weather, most of it overnight. That is the number a skier actually wants at breakfast. Now open Arapahoe Basin at the same moment. Its table is swept at 5am, so at 7am it is showing two hours. Two inches on the A-Basin table and two inches on the Snowmass board are not the same snowfall, and they are not close.
Colorado runs three different clearing times across the seventeen stake cameras we hold in the state, which is why the comparison trips people up:
- 4am, Copper Mountain alone. The Copper stake is a lit column branded SEND-O-METER that puts words next to the inches, FRESHIES at 1, POW DAY at 3, BUMPING at 5, DEEP at 10, MEGA at 12. It also burns the date and clock into the corner of the frame, which none of the other Colorado stakes I opened does, and the one I fetched read 10-13-2026 19:03:13.
- 5am, the larger group: Arapahoe Basin, Beaver Creek, Breckenridge, Monarch and Steamboat's mid-mountain board. These are the ones that read low at breakfast and climb through the morning.
- 4pm, the Aspen four plus Winter Park and Powderhorn.
Steamboat is the honest one. Its sign is printed OFFICIAL MOUNTAIN SNOWFALL SINCE 5:00AM in capitals across the top, so the frame carries its own caveat and you cannot misread it. The Aspen boards say 24 HOUR TOTAL, which is true to within the hour but leaves you to guess which hour. Skico's own mountain cams page does not fill the gap either - the only line it offers about them is "Click on the image below to get the real time Snow Stake feeds".
What to do with one in October
Nothing is going to accumulate on these boards for a few weeks yet, and that is the useful part. A stake with no snow on it shows you the furniture: where the ruler starts, how the lamp throws at night, whether the lens fogs, which trees will be in the way once they are loaded. The Steamboat board sits on a white table in a stand of aspen, still in yellow leaf in the frame I pulled. Arapahoe Basin's is a floodlit metal table with the logo cut out of steel, a ski-tip plate beside the ruler, and spruce crowding in from both sides. Learn those now and a dark 5am frame in February is readable at a glance.
We carry 59 cameras with "snow stake" in the name, spread over thirteen US states, plus Canada, Slovenia, Germany and one on Mount Olympus in New Zealand counting the southern season. Most of them come through OpenSnow, which stood at 1,702 rows in our catalogue with 1,300 live when the facts endpoint computed at 01:15 GMT on 2026-10-14. Where a resort publishes its clearing time we keep it in the camera name, because the name is what you see in a list of search results and a stake without its clearing time is half a fact.
What I have not worked out is how to tell, from the frame alone, that a board has been swept. The sweep is the event that resets the count, and at the moment the only evidence is a number that dropped since the last picture. If you know a resort whose stake camera timestamps its own clearing, I would like the link.