Twenty Years of Whiplash: A Front Range Climate Field Note
Boulder and the Front Range have warmed nearly 2°C since the 1980s. The monthly shape of the year still rhymes with the old climate. The year-to-year envelope does not.
By Lighthouse HLTH Editorial
The 2025–26 ski season in Colorado was the one the data has been threatening for a decade. Statewide snowfall hit a 50-year low. Eldora Mountain Resort, perched at 9,200 feet on the eastern flank of the Continental Divide, closed two weeks early because warm weather wrecked the snowpack. By spring, 21.5% of Colorado was in exceptional drought.
This is not a forecast. This is the record.
What follows is a 20-year field note on what has actually happened to the Front Range climate — temperature, precipitation, snowpack, and wildfire — pulled from NOAA, the Colorado Climate Center, the National Interagency Fire Center, and resort records. The headline is simple and unwelcome: the average climate is now a fiction. The story is the variance.
The old shape of a year
Boulder's monthly climate normal still rhymes with the climate of forty years ago. May is the wettest month, averaging 2.48 inches. July and August are the hottest, with average highs near 87°F. December and March carry the heaviest snowfall, around eight inches each. January is the driest. (See Fig. 1.)
That shape — wet spring, hot dry summer, monsoon, cool autumn, snowy winter — is the climate most Coloradans carry in their heads. It is also the climate that long-term residents and farmers describe when they talk about "the way it used to be." The shape persists in the averages. It does not persist in any given year.
The mean is not the climate. The mean is a story about thirty years of weather, told as though it is a single year. The thirty years that built the current normal are not the thirty years we are currently living in.
The whiplash decade
The defining feature of the last ten years on the Front Range is not the warming trend, which is real but slow. It is the precipitation variance, which is fast and brutal.
September 2013 delivered 18.16 inches of rain on Boulder in a single week — more than half the city's annual average — and shattered every daily and monthly record on the books. The flooding stretched 150 miles, killed eight people, and caused roughly $3 billion in damage. It was the wettest year in Boulder County history.
Ten years later, 2023 broke that record. It was the new wettest year in Boulder County history.
In 2024, the year that immediately followed, the same county recorded its driest year in history.
Back-to-back extrema. Wettest year on record handing the baton directly to driest year on record. (See Fig. 2.)
That is not a trendline. That is a system whose envelope is widening faster than its mean is moving. Plan around the average and you will be wrong in two directions in two consecutive years. The farmers in the eastern foothills already know this. The water managers know it. Insurance underwriters know it. The mental model that hasn't caught up yet is the one most Front Range residents use to make decisions about home, water, fire risk, and recreation.
Eldora: variance, not a cliff
It is tempting to read the 2025–26 ski season as the cliff edge. The data does not support that read.
Eldora's long-term average is 193 inches of seasonal snowfall, per OnTheSnow's resort records. The 2013–14 season delivered 318 inches. The 2023–24 season — two years ago — delivered 234. The 2025–26 season came in at 124, or 64% of normal. (See Fig. 3.)
That is not a cliff. That is a system with rising variance. The warming trend doesn't kill good snow years. It makes them less reliable, and it makes the bad ones worse. Anyone betting on a single season — a child's first ski year, a hospital's planned snow-load capacity, a resort's revenue model — is now betting on a wider distribution than the historical average suggests.
Eldora is a useful sentinel because it is low for Colorado. The base sits at 9,200 feet; the summit at 10,600. That altitude makes Eldora more sensitive to warming than higher resorts like Arapahoe Basin (10,520 base) or Copper Mountain (9,712). What Eldora records this decade is what the higher resorts will record in the next.
The honest read of Fig. 3 is that the deep seasons still come. They are simply rarer, more clustered, and less predictable. A pass holder at Eldora will get powder days for the foreseeable future. They will get fewer of them, in fewer years, and they will not be able to predict which years.
Different ocean basins, different years
The 2025–26 contrast that should change how Front Range families plan is the one between Eldora and the Ubaye Valley in the Southern French Alps.
While Colorado's snowpack hit a 50-year low, Pra-Loup — a mid-elevation resort in the Alpes-de-Haute-Provence — recorded a 104-inch peak base depth on March 10, 2026. Its typical peak is around 59 inches. That is a 176% season. (See Fig. 4.)
The two resorts are weather analogs in some ways and not in others. Both sit at modest elevations by their respective continental standards. Both are non-marquee, family-scale operations rather than world-class powder destinations. (One could call them sister resorts in spirit if not in marketing — both reward the parent who chooses the mountain that's nearby and reliable over the one that's prestigious and far.) But they sit in fundamentally different climate regimes.
Pra-Loup draws moisture from the Mediterranean via retour d'est — the easterly storm pattern that backs into the Southern French Alps when low-pressure systems park over the Italian peninsula. Eldora draws Pacific moisture through La Niña-influenced jet tracks that, in warm-Pacific years like 2025–26, sail too far north to deliver Front Range snowfall.
Two resorts, opposite continents, opposite winters, same planet. The variance in Eldora's column is not a Colorado problem. It is a Pacific problem. The Mediterranean basin is keeping its own books.
For families with cross-continental ties, this is a real meteorological hedge, not a sentimental one. In a weak La Niña paired with warm Pacific sea surface temperatures — which forecasters consider the modal state for the next several winters — the Southern French Alps are statistically the more reliable bet for deep snow. That asymmetry is climate change, but it is not a uniform climate change. Different ocean basins, different storm tracks, different years.
The fire regime has already shifted
The wildfire data tells the same story in a different idiom. (See Fig. 5.)
Through 2011, Colorado's annual acreage burned rarely exceeded 100,000. The 2012 season — Waldo Canyon, High Park — pushed past 384,000 and was treated as exceptional. It wasn't. It was the first year of the new regime.
2018 (the 416 Fire and Spring Creek), 2020 (Cameron Peak, East Troublesome, Pine Gulch — collectively over 660,000 acres in a single season), and the December 30, 2021 Marshall Fire defined what the regime now looks like: bigger, faster, and seasonally unbounded.
The Marshall Fire is the case study that breaks the old mental model. It was a December grass fire, fanned by 100+ mph downslope winds, that destroyed 1,084 homes in suburban Boulder County in roughly an hour. The conditions were the predictable collision of a wetter spring (fuel growth), a hotter summer (fuel drying), a shorter autumn (no early snow cover), and unchanged mountain-wave wind physics. Marshall was not a freak. It was the foreseeable.
October 2020 produced a similar lesson at higher elevation: the East Troublesome Fire grew from 30,000 acres to 170,000 acres in 24 hours on October 21, eventually reaching 193,812 — the second-largest in state history. Snowfall on October 25 was what stopped it. The Front Range now depends on late-autumn snow to end fire season, in a regime where late-autumn snow is increasingly delayed.
Fire season was once "August through September, peaking in late summer." It is now "every month, peaking when the wind is up." That is a different planning problem.
What this means for operators
The takeaway is not "the world is ending." The takeaway is structural and specific.
The mean has drifted. The variance has widened faster than the mean. Both directions of weather extreme have become more frequent. Decisions that depend on the mean — water rights, snow-load engineering, fire-budget assumptions, HVAC sizing, peak-demand modeling, insurance pricing — need to be made against a wider distribution than the historical record suggests.
For healthcare operations specifically, this matters in concrete ways. Wildfire-smoke events that were unknown to Front Range hospitals twenty years ago now drive multi-week PM2.5 exposures, surge respiratory admissions, and HVAC load. Heat-related ED visits, water-rights constraints on cooling-tower operations, December grass-fire risk to suburban facilities, and earlier snowmelt affecting hydroelectric mix on the regional grid are all now within the planning horizon, not outside of it.
The mountains are not over. They are changing. The work is adapting the relationship rather than mourning the old one.
For hospital sustainability and facilities leaders working through these adaptations now, the Vital Signs audit maps where your organization sits across energy, clinical operations, supply chain, transportation, and governance — Colorado-specifically. It is a place to start a conversation that the climate has already started.
Sources: NOAA PSL Boulder · NWS Denver/Boulder · Colorado Climate Center · NIFC · Boulder County OEM · OnTheSnow · J2Ski. Mid-range annual values for 2005–2019 are representative; record and extrema values verified from primary sources. Eldora seasonal snowfall figures from resort records as published via OnTheSnow. Pra-Loup peak base depth from J2Ski historical reports.