Vail Mountain approaches 200 inches of snow for 2024-25 season as big storm blasts Colorado’s mountains
National Weather Service is calling for additional accumulations between 10 and 20 inches
John LaConte/Vail Daily
Vail Mountain has recorded 194 inches cumulative snowfall for the 2024-25 season as of Friday morning, with more snow in the forecast.
That puts the mountain a bit below normal snowpack levels for this time of year, but there’s still plenty of time to get back to average before the end of the season. Vail Mountain is scheduled to close for the season on April 20.
Vail’s cumulative snowfall total has already surpassed the low-snow seasons of 2011-12 and 2017-18, neither of which reached 200 inches of snow. Vail Mountain has benefitted from a big November this season, in which nearly 90 inches were recorded before December.
But Vail’s snow-water equivalent was measuring 10.5 inches as of Thursday, well below the 20-year average of 12.9 inches. By April 15, Vail Mountain should be measuring a snow-water equivalent of about 18 inches if it wants to call this season on par with the 20-year average.
Those averages are measured by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Natural Resources Conservation Service, which has a network of automated Snow Telemetry (SNOTEL) monitoring sites set up throughout the West. One of those sites is on Vail Mountain next to the resort’s mid-mountain snowstake.
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While Vail Mountain’s mid-mountain snowstake is used by the resort to record its daily snowfall totals (that’s from where we get our cumulative total of nearly 200), the USGS SNOTEL site measures snow-water equivalent (SWE), or the amount of water in the snow, as an indicator of how well the snowpack is holding up throughout the West.
The SNOTEL site on Vail Mountain started collecting data in 1978. Since that time, the high SWE for this time of year has been 23.6 inches on Feb. 13, 1997, and the lowest has been 7 inches on Feb. 13, 2013. The average SWE on Feb. 13, for the period between 1978 and 2025, is 13.35 inches. The average SWE on April 15, going back to 1978, is 20.79 inches.
But those averages are shrinking. Go back 20 years to the 2004-05 season, and the average SWE for Feb. 13 over these last two decades is 12.9 inches. For April 15, 2005 to 2024, the average is 18.15 inches.
The 2007 season was identical to this season in terms of snowpack levels as of Feb. 13. The SWE on Feb. 13, 2007 was 10.5 inches, identical to the SWE on Feb. 13, 2025. That’s 19% below the 20-year average SWE of 12.9 inches, but by the end of the season, on April 15, 2007, Vail Mountain was recording a SWE identical to the 20-year average of 18.1 inches.
The SNOTEL site on Vail Mountain has only recorded 0 inches of SWE on April 15 one time 鈥� April 15, 2012. On Feb. 13 of that year, the SWE was recorded at 8.8 inches.
Vail Mountain’s highest recorded SWE on April 15 was 33.2 inches, occurring in 1993. On Feb. 13 of that year, the SWE was 16.4 inches.
A few storms can change SWE dramatically. A week ago, on Feb. 7, the SWE on Vail Mountain was 9.3 inches. A week of intermittent snow boosted that to 10.5 inches as of Thursday.
And there’s more snow on the way. Vail-area schools were canceled as the region was blasted with snow. The National Weather Service’s Grand Junction office issued a Winter Storm Warning on Friday morning, lasting through 6 p.m. on Saturday.
“Additional snow accumulations between 10 and 20 inches,” the National Weather Service reported on Friday morning. “Winds gusting as high as 40 mph.”
