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Comment by rconti | Hacker News Reader

I'm not a Coloradan, but I stayed at a Holiday Inn Express in Boulder on my trip this summer...

It's the end of December and apparently there's no snow (!!?) at 5000ft in Colorado? Insane.

Lifelong Boulderite here. No snow on the ground is very typical during winter. If it does snow, it often doesn't stick around for very long since Colorado gets a lot of sunshine. However, it has still been unusually dry. Fires have been getting worse and worse every year, but always during the summer and fall months. I've never seen anything like this during winter in my whole life.

Thanks- my wife went to Fort Collins and talked about it always being sunny and nice between snows, but I didn't realize the ground cleared completely; I figured it would be too cold for that (another frequent component to her stories :) )

The overall dryness is not normal, but Denver/Boulder does not generally have snow on the ground consistently in winter. (Up in the mountains is obviously a different story).

The joke in Denver is sometimes that the city's snow plowing plan for the sidestreets appears to be "wait for it to melt" ....which works most of the time. Even in January the average day is over 45F, which combined with the sunny climate often makes short work of snow.

We've gotten snow, and it's not unusual for 5000ft to not have snow right now (that's even lower elevation than boulder proper), but it's way less total snow than we normally have gotten by now. That being said, it's also pretty normal for a la nina year to be light on precipitation early in the winter, and we get it all during the spring.

No moisture in an arid climate with lots of sunshine? Insane.

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