Mountain West Discussion

[finnster]

On 10/5/2026 at 1:36 PM, frontranger8 said:

Depends on how you define "very early" and "storm", but several of the very strong Ninos have featured big early season snowfalls: 1997, 1991, 1972. All within a week of Halloween.

Agree with this. I've lived on the front range since the '60's. It was fairly common to have early snow storms in October, or even in September (September 1971 was memorable). We would almost always have 1 or 2 snows in the books by Halloween. Now the front range often doesn't see its first snow until November, or even later.  Looking back, IMHO things shifted around the year 2000 to warmer and drier. Bummer for those of us who don't like that!

[finnster]

3 hours ago, mayjawintastawm said:

Yeah, pretty weird that we have not had a sub-45 F temp at my house. Was walking the dog at 10:30 last night in shorts. Typically our first hard freeze is this week. Also can vouch for Chinook's pictures as representative of the mountains in CO generally- flew from SW to NE yesterday, right over BV, and snow levels were between 12 and 13K feet and nothing deep enough to be consequential. Basically nothing on south facing slopes. A good month behind.

Those are beautiful web cam shots indeed. It's good to see at least a little bit of snow on those high peaks. Here on the northern front range we don't even have that. I fish on the Poudre River quite a bit and it is basically a trickle now. Many lakes and reservoirs are drying up. If this winter doesn't at least start making a dent in this drought, things are going to get pretty ugly water-wise.