Steamboat Springs, CO Real Estate and Community Blog

It’s official. The snowfall we’ve had in Steamboat Springs is more snow than any other year on record. (Or since they started manipulating the numbers, but more on that later.) The mountain officially posted 450″ of snow on Mt. Werner–almost 38 feet of snow for the year!

The skiing has been incredible with powder days blurring into one another. Ten inches one day, eight the next…it was easy to start getting jaded about snow. People even started doing the Cardinal Sin of the Ski Industry–talking about wishing the snow would melt. Blasphemy!

It’s hard to believe around Thanksgiving I was hiking up on the mountain with my friend Janette and we walked up to the new Christie Peak Express upper terminal with sneakers on. There literally was no snow except for the man-made stuff the new snowmaking equipment turned out.

Well, within two weeks we were buried in it. Snowblowers were like gold. People shoveled their roofs. Everyone left town–if only for a weekend–just to see a real blade of grass.

We’ve had a great ski season and our snow pack is well above average. It’s been a great year. We are still months away from seeing a crocus, but if you like skiing and snow sports, this is a great place to visit and a better place to live!

(Now, about those numbers. Snow is one of the main things that ski resorts use to market their ski area because some visitors make travel plans based on “who is getting the snow.” Even Denver tv stations list how many inches each resort received in the past 48 hours and how deep the base is. So it’s important for every resort to appear “snowy”.

That being said, Steamboat never bothered to count the snow that fell in October or November because it melted and didn’t really affect the skiing. A few years ago, someone up at the mountain (undoubtably the marketing department) got a rather brilliant idea to start totalling all snow, not just the snow that fell and stuck.

So this year is a record year, and everyone is excited, and there is an unbelieveably huge amount of snow that fell, but there is the possibility that one of the other 400+” of snow years may have actually had more snow.

Of course, we still have over two weeks left in the season and we’ll get even more snow. This record year will be a true record year, no matter what calculator you are using!)