California ski resort webcams & snow report

California skiing is two different worlds. Lake Tahoe — Palisades Tahoe, Heavenly, Northstar, Kirkwood and a ring of smaller hills — sits on the Sierra crest and takes the brunt of Pacific storms, so the snow arrives in big, wet, multi-foot dumps rather than daily refills. Mammoth, in the Eastern Sierra, is higher and drier and runs one of the longest seasons in the country, while the Southern California areas above Los Angeles ski on snowmaking and the occasional storm within sight of the desert.

PeakCam tracks 21 ski resorts in California across 5 regions: Lake Tahoe (10), Southern California (5), Central Sierra (3), Eastern Sierra (2) and others. 20 of them have live webcams on PeakCam — 52 cams in all.

14 of the 21 have an assigned NRCS SNOTEL or SCAN station, so their base depth and new snow are sensor readings synced every six hours; the other 7 have no station nearby and use weather-model estimates (Open-Meteo) instead — each resort page says which.

PeakCam treats this as the off-season in California: 18 of 21 resorts report no base, and the 2026–27 season is next. Cams, snow reports and powder alerts keep running year-round.