Snow at least!

On February 17, our long snow drought ended as I was able to sample the delights of Utah’s fabled powder snow for (almost) the first time this season. From a historical standpoint, this year’s drought over the Rocky Mountains and over Utah and Park City is a record-breaking one. 

According to SNOTEL data and historical weather logs, February 2026 has seen the lowest statewide snowpack ever recorded, even dipping below the previous record low of 1977. Our current snowpack levels were hovering around 49% of the median. Historically, if a winter does not "catch up" by mid-February, the odds of reaching a normal snowpack by April 1st are less than 10%, according to the Utah Avalanche Center. 

Hopefully the abundant snowfall we just received will do better than this! When looking back through written records and tree-ring data (which have been used to track moisture over centuries), the following winters stand out as the most significant "drought years" for Park City and its surrounding area. It all begun in a period from 1896 to 1907. called the "Great Drought", during the era of silver mining in Park City, when none of us were born yet, when we had some very lean winters, when our lush meadows on the high plateaus "turned to dust beds." 

This is considered by climatologists to be the most severe drought since the settlement of Utah. A bad winter happened in 1933–1934 during the Dust Bowl Era. This was before skiing was ingrained as a “popular sport.” That winter saw the lowest winter precipitation year in Utah’s recorded history since statewide tracking began in the late 1800s. 

The Impact was severe; by May 1934, Utah's mountain streams, which peak in spring, reportedly looked like "August trickles." Agriculture around Park City was devastated. This period (1930–1936) represents the most severe multi-year moisture deficit in the state's modern history. 

Then came the winter of 1976–1977, called that of the "Benchmark", often referred to by locals as "the winter that didn't happen." This was long before man-made snow came to the West, so many resorts, including Park City, struggled to open at all before Christmas. 

In November and December 1976, Alta (the regional high-water mark) received only 30.5 inches of snow—the lowest early-season total in modern records until now. The big difference was that 1977 was a "cold drought", freezing but bone-dry. In contrast this 2025-2026 is a "compound drought" because it’s both dry and record-warm, meaning much of what would have been snow fell as rain or melted immediately. 

We had the 2014–2015 called the "Short" Winter that held the record for the lowest total seasonal snowfall at many measuring stations. This luckily happened as we were finishing building our new home and welcomed the sparse snow. 

In Park City, the total snowfall for that season was only 154 inches (the average is closer to 270–300 inches). While following our home’s building progress, I still managed to ski 87 times and descend almost 1,273,955 feet (388,301 meters). 

Finally, we had the 2017–2018 that we call the “Recent Low”, something I can’t hardly remember since it didn’t make a huge dent in my skiing (I skied 108 times and some 1,833,435 feet vertical (558,831 meters)). 

On New Year’s Day 2018, Utah’s statewide Snow Water Equivalent (SWE) was just 3.0 inches. In late December 2025, that record was broken when the SWE dropped to 2.7 inches, cementing this current year as the new "worst on record." 

All this doesn’t tell us how long we’ll keep on receiving snow, but for the moment we got a season’s extension!