Several inches of snow are expected to hit much of the Rocky Mountains this weekend, including popular ski areas like Winter Park, Vail, Aspen and Monarch Mountain. In the southwest corner of Colorado, major storms could dump up to thirty inches of snow near Telluride and Purgatory. The Wolf Creek Ski Area could also see flakes this weekend, with predictions as high as 26 inches for the southern Colorado resort, which is typically the state’s snowiest.
Still, most Colorado ski areas likely won’t open until November.
Colorado Resorts Are Already Making Snow
But there are positive signs at Arapahoe Basin, traditionally one of the earliest ski areas to open and the last to close due to its high elevation. According to the A-Basin Facebook page, the ski area fired up its snowmaking machine for the first time on October 18, when temperatures finally dropped low enough to sustain the pumped-in powder.
“Our snowmaking team was at it early this morning to get our first snowmaking session of this storm underway,” Arapahoe Basin wrote. “Let’s hope these temps hold over the weekend.”
Loveland Ski Area also started snowmaking on October 18, hinting that opening day is “right around the corner.” Fellow high-altitude ski resort Copper Mountain says it’s already seeing snow, and nearby Keystone Resort announced on October 18 that it has begun snowmaking for the year.
Winter Park Resort, the Grand County facility that is technically owned by Denver, invested $37 million in its snowmaking system during the off-season, promising it will be ready as soon as temperatures are appropriate. The resort got a dusting of snow overnight heading into October 18.
Steamboat Springs could see more snow than usual, owing to an incoming La Niña weather pattern that typically brings more snow to the northern parts of the country.
National Weather Service Issues Its Winter Outlook
The National Weather Service published its Winter Outlook on October 17, but it doesn’t give too much insight into where, exactly, the most snow will fall in Colorado’s mountains.“The outlook does not project seasonal snowfall accumulations as snow forecasts are generally not predictable more than a week in advance,” the NWS notes.
However, the news may not be good for the southernmost ski areas in Colorado, as the NWS predicts a dry winter in the Four Corners region. Additionally, drought is predicted to persist for almost all of Colorado, indicating a possibly low snowfall total for the upcoming season.
“Widespread moderate to extreme drought continues across much of the Great Plains and in portions of the Rocky Mountains, especially farther south,” the NWS predicts.
But a new tool could be coming to help skiers plan out which weekends they want to ski (or which days they’ll need to ditch work). In November, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration will make its Experimental Probabilistic Precipitation Portal available to the public.
“This webpage will enable users to view the Low-End, Expected and High-End amounts of snow and rain, as well as probabilities of exceeding threshold amounts of precipitation,” the NWS says.
In the meantime, Colorado Ski Country’s Snow Report page has regularly updated information about which mountains are getting powder.
