SnowfallCheck

Do you need a snowblower in Ferndale, WA?

Your answer for Ferndale

A shovel is enough

A normal winter drops about 0.4 tons of snow on this driveway in Ferndale, spread over a few light falls. That is shovel work.

Get a wide plastic shovel with a bent handle before the first fall, and if you have a bad back, consider a cordless single-stage instead: the snow in Ferndale is light enough for one.

What a Ferndale winter brings

Snow a year
3 in
Storms of 5 in or more
0.1 a winter
Storms of 10 in or more
almost never
Days with snow on the ground
3

Light, below most snowy cities. A typical snowy US city gets about 10.0 times as much. Most of it melts within a few days, so in Ferndale waiting a day is often a real option.

On a two car driveway that is about 0.4 tons of snow to move in a season, and a 10 inch storm weighs 2,600 pounds.

When the snow comes in Ferndale

  1. Oct0.1
  2. Nov0.8
  3. Dec0.3
  4. Jan1.1
  5. Feb0.6
  6. Mar0.5

Inches of new snow per month, averaged over 1991 to 2020.

Ferndale and its neighbours

Ferndale is number 68 of 91 Washington towns here for snowfall; Spokane gets the most at 45 inches.

TownMilesSnowTwo car, paved
Bellingham, WA93 inA shovel is enough
Lynden, WA911 inA shovel is enough
Anacortes, WA255 inA shovel is enough
Sedro-Woolley, WA296 inA shovel is enough
Burlington, WA296 inA shovel is enough
Mount Vernon, WA336 inA shovel is enough

Where these numbers come from

Read next: What a winter of snow weighs and Why storm depth matters more than snowfall.

NOAA 1991 to 2020 climate normals from Bellingham 3 SSW, 10.0 miles from Ferndale. A normal winter, not this winter's forecast. Snow is weighed at 6.24 pounds a cubic foot, fresh and fairly dry; wet spring snow can weigh three times that.