The median SNOTEL station in the American West is at 24% of normal snowpack. That means if you line up every reporting station from driest to snowiest, the one in the middle is at 24%. The average is higher, pulled up by a handful of stations in the North Cascades, Alaska, and Montana, but that's like saying the average person in a bar with Jeff Bezos is a billionaire. Nearly one in four is reading zero, at a time where most places in the west are typically at their peak for the year.

The USDA's SNOTEL network is a system of roughly 900 automated stations scattered across mountain sites in the West. They've been collecting data since the early 1980s, and they measure two things that are very relevant right now: snow depth and snow water equivalent (SWE).

Snow depth is just how many inches of snow are on the ground. Useful for storm tracking and skiing. But the snow depth by itself doesn't tell you much about water supply, because snow density can vary wildly. A foot of champagne powder might contain an inch of water. A foot of heavier snow might contain four or five inches. Two sites can have identical snow depth and completely different densities.

SWE measures the actual liquid water content of the snowpack. Think of it this way: if you melted all the snow right now, SWE is how many inches of water you would actually get. This is the number that matters the most for water discussions, because it what determines how much water flows into rivers and reservoirs during spring and summer melt.

One caveat on the numbers throughout this piece: SNOTEL data is updated frequently (which you can explore at snotel.hereandthere.club) and changes hourly/daily. Some stations go offline temporarily (or the API goes down), a few inches of new snow can bump a reading, and the exact figures and percentages will depend on exactly when you pull the data. The numbers I'm citing are based on figures I’ve looked at over the last two weeks, and I’ve already revised several times closer to publishing. If you go dig into the tool yourself and see slightly different figures, that's why. The broad picture isn't going to change, but individual station readings might shift by a few points in either direction.

You’re probably already aware that it’s been a bad snow year. But to put it in perspective, if I picked a station at random almost anywhere in the West and told you it's having its worst year on record (without looking at the data), I’d probably be right. At hundreds of sites with decades of continuous data, Water Year (WY) 2026 is the worst ever measured, and in many places by a wide margin.

We’re currently at about 21% of median snowpack across the west. That means that for every 10” of water typically in the snowpack on this date, there’s currently about 2”. Across all 713 active stations, 45% are at or below 25% of normal. Nearly a quarter are at zero. Only 12 stations in the entire West, 1.7% of the network, are above 125%. A few spots that drive home the current situation:

Vail hit a peak SWE of 9.5 inches this winter. In 48 years of records, the previous low was 12.4" during 2012. Vail currently sits at 2.9" of SWE, or 13% of its average peak.

On March 23, the historical median peak at Palisades Tahoe, SWE was at 9.4” vs a historical 46”. It continued dropping from there. It did just snow, but that’s not going to make a meaningful difference, it’s still tracking toward one of the worst years ever.

Snowbird, one of the most consistently deep resorts in the Rockies, managed to track above historical minimums for most of the season. But, over the last few days it dropped below those minimums. It’s at 17.2" against a 36" normal, the lowest reading ever on today’s date.

Bad snow years happen, but this is a bit different. Not only in how poor the snowpack is, but the breadth of effect across the west. Sure, the east had a great season but everywhere west of the Mississippi and from the Canada to Mexico had a dismal year.

December temperatures in Utah and Colorado were the warmest on record, so precipitation fell as rain instead of snow. January was straight-up dry. February was closer to average on precipitation but still warm. And then, in mid-March, a “heat dome” settled over the West with temperatures reaching 30º above normal. The Rockies, which typically reach peak SWE in early April, basically peaked a full month early, and SWE fell off a (steep) cliff. The season was too warm, then too dry, then too warm again.

Water. The Colorado River Basin supplies water to around 40 million people across seven states. The current forecast for water flowing into Lake Powell through July is about 2.3 million acre-feet, which works out to about a third of normal. The Glen Canyon Dam can’t reliably generate hydroelectric power below an elevation of 3,490 feet, and the current most optimistic outcome is that Lake Powell finishes the year within two feet of losing the ability to generate electricity.

As this crisis is unfolding, those seven states are in their most contentious water negotiation in a century, with the current guidelines expiring at the end of 2026 and no agreement yet in place. The 1922 compact that currently governs the river allocated water based on unusually wet years, but river flows have shrunk 20% since 2000, and every dry year like this makes things a bit more complicated.

Fire. It seems obvious, but a snowpack that already gone in April and May won't melt gradually through June and July, leading to drier conditions.

Research published in Environmental Research Letters just last week (Balik et al., Western Colorado University) analyzed 36 years of data about what drives fire issues in the west. They found that early snowmelt drives longer fire seasons and more total area burned. But specifically, they found that low SWE drives more severe fires: higher tree mortality, greater ecosystem damage, and increased likelihood of long-term forest loss. So not just more fires, but worse fires. "Snowpack acts as a kind of seasonal water savings account for forests," Balik said. "When that account runs low, soils dry out earlier, vegetation loses moisture, and forests become more vulnerable to severe fire." Unfortunately, 2026 has both a record-early melt and record-low SWE.

There’s also a feedback loop of sorts: forests that burn severely don't regenerate the canopy that previously accumulated and shaded snowpack. Severe fire begets worse snowpack begets more severe fire. And repeat.

Recreation and tourism. Skiing is the obvious one here, and Vail’s stock price is a decent bellwether for just how bad this season was for the industry. I’ve seen a few pictures of backcountry zones I usually ski until the end of June almost bone-dry this week. But a whole range of water-dependent activities face a shortened or uncertain season. Rivers will see rafting windows compress dramatically, with flows drying up months ahead of typical peak season. A couple rivers in Colorado are flowing at ~200% of normal right now, and not in a good way. That’s going to quickly drop to a fraction of normal as they reach peak flows months early, then dry up.

Fishing, floating, and reservoir recreation all depend on a seasonal water cycle that's broken this year. Places like Glen Canyon (which drove 3.73M recreation visits in 2025) have visitation trends that correlate pretty consistently with Lake Powell’s elevation. Fire, as I noted in last week’s dive on NPS visitation, also results in large swings in tourism patterns as areas close or are affected by air quality issues.

The outdoor recreation economy that produced $1.3 trillion in economic output is built on assumptions about functional natural systems. Rural recreation economies could be hard hit by a new normal where skiing ends in March, rivers run low by June, and fire closes wide swathes of public land and affects air quality the entire summer.

Yes, WY2026 is statistically extreme. No weather model predicted this year’s specific combination of warm-wet followed by warm-dry followed by crazy “heat-dome”. So in that sense, yes, it's an outlier.

But, the pattern of precipitation falling as rain instead of snow at mid-elevations is exactly what climate models have been projecting for decades. Research published in Nature in 2024 found clear attribution of declining snowpack to climate change across the Northern Hemisphere.

The question for future years isn't whether we’ll have more years that are this bad. It’s basically a certainty at this point. But will it occur every 30, 20, or 10 years? If it occurs more often (which is what warming trends suggest is increasingly possible), the economics, hydrology, and fire ecology of regions start to fundamentally change.

Meanwhile, the outdoor industry's advocacy response to this moment has been, charitably, inadequate. Brands still remain mostly quiet on climate related topics and are reluctant to wade into political battles. The West is facing a summer where fire could close huge swaths of public land and water systems are at breaking points. The current administration will probably refuse disaster aid, say that Democratic states deserve it, and mumble something unintelligible about raking forests. They’re going to keep defunding climate science, cutting public lands budgets, and attempting to privatize parks. I hope more big players recognize these crises as existential for the industry and stop tiptoeing around these topics. When winter doesn't show up, so many things downstream (sorry) are at risk.