Colorado Mountains Hit with Snow Storm on the Last Day of Summer

Yesterday morning our family woke up to a winter wonderland that was absolutely beautiful. Everywhere we looked was white. Although it was the last day of summer, snow was falling and actually building here in the mountains of Colorado. The roads were still very warm from our nice summer, so it was not bad traveling in the morning, but as the day progressed, so did the cold and the snow and after a while, the snow was sticking to everything and the roads became slick and dangerous, especially higher up the mountain, near Divide and Cripple Creek.

Our family traveled up the mountain into Florissant to look at a house and the further up the mountain we went, the more slush we encounter and the slower we had to travel. The highway was covered in a slick slush by the time we made it to Florissant. There didn't seem to be any snow plows anywhere on the roads either which we thought odd for the mountain highway.

After leaving the house we went to view, we headed out towards Cripple Creek to take pictures of the fall leaves for an AC call I am working on. I thought the trees covered in snow would give such an awesome personality to the photos and would look really cool too. I did get a lot of wonderful photos, but the roads were quite bad on the road we like to take for our photos of the trees and nature. It is a dirt road and it was covered in a thick slush, that had even our all wheel drive van all over the road at times.

We decided to head back to town after only about 30 minutes, because it began to snow again and we feared highway 67 would be closed before we made it back to highway 24 in Divide. As it turned out, highway 67 had been closed for a few hours and there had been a number of cars and a casino bus that went off the road on highway 67! From what we were told today, the highway department was hit off guard by this storm and was not prepared to keep the roads cleared off yet this year.

Today was an even bigger surprise when we all woke. Through the night the snow continued to fall, by morning it was apparent that at least 3 inches of snow had fallen, possibly more! As the day has progressed, the snow has fallen off and on, most everything has melted, as it did warm up to about 40 for an hour or so today, but as night is falling upon Colorado, the snow also is falling and the forecast says it will continue to fall, as will the temperatures. I suspect that all the wet stuff out side will be frozen by morning, with our temps dropping down to a low of 23 - 30 degrees tonight!

Our forecast for tonight calls for more snow with accumulations of 1 -3 inches by morning. Tomorrow periods of snow and rain, with snow accumulations of 2 - 6 inches. Tomorrow night... 40 percent chance of snow showers. By Saturday, we are to be in the 60s and sunny! Wow, what a start to fall!