Above Average Snowfall

After two months of light snowfall, February ended with total monthly snowfall in downtown Breckenridge at above average for the first time since early in the season.

Rick Bly, who measures snowfall for the National Weather Service, tallied 35 inches for the month, well above the 23.4 inches that's average for the month based on records going back more than a 100 years.

The snow melted down to 2.38 inches of water, also well above the average 1.72 inches. Bly said the high winds made it tricky to measure the snowfall totals toward the end of the month. For the season to date, Bly has measured 130.8 inches of snow, making for a 23 percent surplus based largely on the big October storms that added up to more than three times the normal snowfall for that month.

"March is typically the snowiest month," Bly said, adding that Breckenridge averages 26.5 inches for the month. The record March snowfall for the area dates way back to the legendary winter of 1899, when Breckenridge saw 120 inches.

"The last real stinker we had was in 1999, with only 11.5 inches," Bly said, adding that March is the most consistently snowy month. March 2003 was noteworthy for the big Front Range upslope blizzard that hammered a few spots with more than 90 inches of snow. Avalanches after that storm closed I-70 east of the tunnel for a while and even damaged a 100-year old building near Georgetown. That storm spilled far enough over the Continental Divide to help boost March 2003 snowfall at Breckenridge to 47.5 inches.