How big of a winter will it be? 

By Tim Hauserman 

It’s that time of year again, when the age old question all mountain folk ask is: How big a winter will it be? The simple answer is nobody knows. No matter how sophisticated the weather predictors are at telling us what will happen in the next two weeks, they really have nary a clue when it comes to the overall prospects for the winter. 

For fun though, we can look at past trends and quickly come to the realization that a so called  “average” is a combination of monster winters where the snow gets so deep we are sick of shoveling it, to those mild winters when we wish it would snow more. Perhaps the rarest of winters is the Goldilocks zone right in the middle. 

Yesterday I took a stroll to Fanny Bridge where the Truckee River begins in Tahoe City. John Sutter, the Gatekeeper, has put up a sign at the back of the dam showing our winter snow totals since 2007.

The snow totals between 2007 and 2024 varied from a low of 33.5 inches in 2015 to a high of 329.5 inches for 2011 (and just behind it 321.5 in 2023, and we all remember what sort of a winter that was. All sore back and exclamations of “when will it ever end”).

In the last ten years the numbers have been all over the board. We had the lean years of 2014, 2015, 2016, 2018, 2020 and 2021 all below 150 inches. And four big years above 240 inches: 2011, 2017, 2019,  and 2023. Do you see any rhyme, reason or pattern there? Me neither. 

One important piece of information to consider is that these measurements were taken at 6200 feet in elevation right next to Lake Tahoe. Areas further from the lake, on the west side of Lake Tahoe or Donner Lake, and at higher elevations often get lots more snow. Also, the yearly snow total doesn’t necessarily directly equate to precipitation totals. As we all know, some winters we get a lot of warm storms with good snow amounts up high and mostly rain at lake level. Other years it’s mostly cold storms which comes in all snow above 5000 feet.   

In the end, it’s fairly simple: We don’t know how much snow we will get this year. All we can do is cross our fingers and hope for enough to ski, but not so much we can’t get to the ski areas. 

Water level at the Truckee River Dam over the last 125 years.