From the Vail Daily (Edward Stoner):
Just before the storm hit, the snowpack for the Colorado River Basin region of the state, which includes Eagle County, was 76 percent of average. It was 85 percent of average statewide. “It is a little bit (troubling), especially given that we’ve got about two to three weeks of our normal season remaining when we can really accumulate much snow,” said Mike Gillespie, snow survey supervisor for the Natrual Resources Conservation Service…
Municipalities and farmers with more junior water rights may not get all the water they want this year, Gillespie said. The Vail area will need three times average snowfall between now and April 14 to return to normal, Gillespie said. This is the lowest snowpack year in Colorado Basin since the 2002 drought year, he said. But Friday’s storm is a good boost. Eight inches of wet snow would boost the area’s snowpack by 10 percentage points compared to average, he said.
On Fremont Pass, where the Eagle River Water and Sanitation District gets much of its water supply, the snowpack was at 85 percent of average as of Monday.
the northwest part of the state is at just 73 percent of average snowpack, while the Rio Grande Basin in the south is at 108 percent of average.
From the Colorado Daily (Vanessa Miller):
Flakes started flying after midnight Friday, and 12.3 inches of snow had stacked up in Boulder as of 6 p.m. — breaking the previous record of 10.8 inches for the date, according to a local meteorologist…
On March 1, in two locations where snowpack experts measure the weight of water content just below the Continental Divide near Nederland, readings were 81 percent and 59 percent of the long-term averages for that time of year, respectively. Boulder also gauges its water-supply conditions at a “snow pillow” in the same area. As of March 15, the pillow was at 64 percent of the long-term average, [Carol Ellinghouse, Boulder’s water resources coordinator] said.