Weather
Colorado stays mostly dry and springlike through Monday, then turns cooler and snowier from Tuesday night into Thursday, with the San Juans favored for the best totals. Warm afternoons and breezy ridgelines will keep the weekend squarely in spring mode before mountain snow returns. The best midweek accumulation still looks focused on Wolf Creek, Telluride, Crested Butte, and Monarch, while most of the I-70 corridor trends toward a moderate refresher rather than a major cycle. Confidence is strongest from Tuesday night through Thursday afternoon, with another colder wave possible later next weekend but much less settled.
Friday stays cooler, then the weekend and Monday trend much warmer and mostly dry under a spring ridge. Individual guidance is tightly clustered on that part of the forecast, so confidence is good in a firm-early, soft-late surface cycle with mountain temperatures climbing into the mid 40s to low 50s °F most afternoons. A few isolated mountain showers or flurries can pop late in the day, but coverage and accumulation look too small to matter for ski quality. The bigger issue will be wind on exposed terrain, with many ridgelines gusting 25 to 40 mph Saturday through Monday and the roughest periods likely late Saturday and again Monday.
Guidance then converges on a real pattern change from Tuesday night into Thursday, although it still spreads the onset from Tuesday evening into Wednesday afternoon and keeps the heaviest banding favored over southern and southwest Colorado. Snow levels look relatively high at the start, generally near 9,000 to 10,000 feet, so lower mountain snow comes in dense first at Vail, Beaver Creek, Snowmass, and Steamboat before levels settle lower. SLRs mostly in the 8-12 range support dense-to-moderate spring snow rather than blower powder, and most solutions keep winds more manageable during the core snowfall than during the warmup before ridges pick back up Thursday. Wolf Creek is the clearest standout at 11″-21″, with Telluride and Crested Butte closer to 7″-12″, Monarch around 5″-10″, and much of the I-70 corridor nearer 3″-7″.
After Thursday evening, confidence drops off quickly as the individual solutions diverge on whether Colorado gets just scattered leftovers or another broader Friday night through Sunday wave. The conservative call is for a cooler, more unsettled stretch with periodic mountain snow chances and lower snow levels, but only lighter refresh potential for now, generally around 2″-6″ where showers organize. A snowier weekend outcome is still on the table in some guidance, especially for the central and northern mountains, but it is not consistent enough yet to lean hard into. The broader signal into next week still favors Colorado staying more active than the recent ridge pattern, so this does not look like a one-and-done change.
Resort Forecast Totals (Tue Mar 31 – Thu Apr 02)
- Wolf Creek – 11″-21″
- Telluride – 7″-12″
- Crested Butte – 6″-12″
- Monarch – 5″-10″
- Snowmass – 4″-8″
- Loveland – 4″-7″
- Arapahoe Basin – 4″-7″
- Steamboat – 3″-7″
- Vail – 3″-6″
- Beaver Creek – 3″-6″
- Winter Park – 3″-5″
- Copper Mountain – 2″-4″
- Breckenridge – 2″-3″
