Half a star for being near Melbourne City, (3 and half stars needs more of accommodation and pubs nightlife which Melbourne should be supporting if it wasn't so much of a rag and Irish)
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Lovely Mt Baw Baw is the perfect spot in Australia to experience your first turns on snow in a place that is reminiscent of the way it used to be! More economical than other resorts, Baw Baw has enough mellow terrain in a sheltered environment that is blissfully quiet & pleasing on the eye when mantled in snow.

The key to skiing Baw Baw is to go when there is actually some snow on the ground. Its low summit elevation, but southerly location & aspect, mean it is feast or famine here. The snow-making is OK these days, but nothing can fight the onslaught of above zero temps & liquid sunshine (...rain!).

Driving up to the mountain can have its moments. Winding up through lush forest, try and count how many lyrebirds you see along the way. We counted 17 one morning! Further up near the resort, the last section of road has some of the steepest pitches of any major alpine road (just ask the Tour de France riders that train on it!). In icy conditions it can be quite a handful. Prepare accordingly.

There is nothing for most intermediate & advanced skiers & boarders here. Only go for a cut-price learn-to-ski family trip or for a humourous trip down memory lane. Anyone that has spent a weekend here in their youth will know what I mean!
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I took my nieces to Mt Baw Baw for a day trip from Melbourne during school holidays. It was easy to drive there, get a car park close to the village, get ski rentals and get onto the slopes. If we’d gone to Mt Buller instead for a day trip, this process would have taken much longer and also cost a whole lot more. The downside was that it was borderline snowing at Baw Baw, and for parts of the day it was just raining. Meanwhile it was snowing more than raining at Mt Buller.

The girls hadn’t skied for a year so we had a couple of warm up runs on the Summit. We then wanted to progress onto the blue and black runs, but the Hut Run Platter lift was a major hurdle for us. It was very busy and there were a whole series of ski school groups that were using the lower part of this tow who had priority lift line access. Many of the ski school kids were having trouble riding the disc tow and when they fell off, they had the right to come to the front of the line to try again. My nieces had only ridden chair lifts before, and the younger one was having difficulty mastering the tow so she fell off a couple of times, and unlike the ski school kids, she didn’t have priority lift access and had to return to the back of the line. It took 2 hours to do 2 runs off that lift before we gave up and could finally move across to the Maltese Cross T-bar.

We enjoyed this area the most because there were absolutely no crowds (possibly like us, other people had trouble getting across there!) and we could rip laps of the runs. There was only one fall off the T-bar, and unfortunately the line of snow adjacent to the T-bar was so narrow that the only way we could get down was to head off-piste! Well that was pretty entertaining considering there wasn’t a huge amount of snow cover!

By the end of the day, the girls had reacquainted themselves with skiing and whilst they’d had a lot of fun, they were asking when they could return to Mt Hotham for more challenging skiing.

Mt Baw Baw certainly has its merits for snow-players and first timers, but they’ve got to do something about the logjams at the Hut Run Platter.
See our video here