What Was the Deepest Snow in Your State? greeted me on my daily visit to The Weather Channel and I was startled to see how Tennessee placed in the state rankings.
I remember the winter of 1993 and the snow we drove through on the way to DC in February. I was not aware that that March set the all-time record.
Do you have any special memories of the record snow depth in your state?
I do remember a few years ago. At my house, we measured just over 30 feet of snow fall at our house for the winter. Seems like all I did was plow that year.
I think that was the same year we had to dig down to the shed to shovel the roof where I was living outside Durango. I remember reading that we had 333% of average snowfall that year.
Michigan seems to be tops for the non-mountainous states with 117 inches in the Keweenaw; we’re #37, followed a bunch of states with mountains, where (of course) there are areas that get a shitload of snow.
You are up by Hoosier pass, yes? I remember getting 4 feet by my tape measure in Denver in 2003. It sucked as my eldest daughter was just 5 months old and we were out of power for 3 days. I had friends in the hills outside of Boulder that got 7 feet in that one storm.
But it seems that there is a qualification that it must melt over the course of the summer or something similar. There are certainly glaciers deeper than these snow depths reported here. But even more interesting is that without looking hard, I was able to find reports of snow depths far higher than the records reported. Two years ago, for instance, Mount Baker highway didn’t open due to 50’ of snow (which would be 600" and far greater than the 367" credited for Washington) remaining on June 30 and the costs for plowing it were too high. Now that year was incredible in the amount of snow received even for Paradise- too bad the Vancouver Olympics hadn’t waited another year. So it seems to me that there are some other qualifications to declare these records.
Yep, about 1/4 mile from the top of Hoosier. Denver got it worse than the mountains with that one. I ended up driving down to help some family members.
I had some business with Gilpin County back then and I drove up Boulder Canyon to the Peak-to-Peak Highway. The evergreen trees had a really weird look to them, with a lot of white on the top. I thought it must be snow, but it just didn’t look right.
The person I was meeting asked me how the drive was considering all the snow, and I asked her about the trees. It turns out thousands of them had snapped in half from the weight of all the snow. I suppose they had been weakened by the Bark Beetles, but still…