Weather
As spring turned to summer on June 21st, Steamboat, Colorado was getting dumped on, finishing up with almost 2-FEET of fresh snow, and delighted skiers and snowboarders were clinging on to what remained of winter by shredding fresh powder at Arapahoe Basin. All that snow has boosted the state’s already historic snowpack to extraordinary levels for the time of year.
The most recent storm marked the continuation of a snowy stretch that began in January and February and lingered through spring. Even before the summer snow, The Denver Post wrote, the state’s snowpack was “in virtually every numerical sense . . . off the charts.” At the time, the statewide snowpack was 751 percent above normal.
So, thanks to the new snow that began Friday and continued through the weekend, the state’s snowpack exploded to a crazy 4,121 percent above normal as of Monday. This number is so high because ordinarily very little snow is left by late June, and cold temperatures late into the spring helped preserve what fell earlier.
Of course, for this time of year when there’s usually very little to zero snow on the ground, any depth of snowpack would create an anomaly. As Mark Twain put it, “lies, damned lies, and statistics.
All that precipitation doesn’t come without its perils though, the Colorado rivers and waterways are currently deadly right now due to the amount of runoff, with at least 5 lives claimed already.
