Do you need a snowblower in Montrose, CO?
The machine for a Montrose driveway
A shovel is enough
A normal winter drops about 2.8 tons of snow on this driveway in Montrose, 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 Montrose is light enough for one.
A normal Montrose winter
- Snow a year
- 22 in
- Storms of 5 in or more
- 0.6 a winter
- Storms of 10 in or more
- almost never
- Days with snow on the ground
- 36
Light, below most snowy cities. A typical snowy US city gets about 1.7 times as much. It tends to stay, so each storm lands on the last one.
On a two car driveway that is about 2.8 tons of snow to move in a season, and a 10 inch storm weighs 2,600 pounds.
When the snow comes in Montrose
- Oct0.5
- Nov2.7
- Dec6.9
- Jan4.7
- Feb3.9
- Mar2.2
- Apr0.6
Snow worth clearing runs from November to March, heaviest in December. Buy the shovel before the first fall, when stores still have them.
Towns near Montrose
Montrose is number 51 of 53 Colorado towns here for snowfall; Steamboat Springs gets the most at 185 inches.
| Town | Miles | Snow | Two car, paved |
|---|---|---|---|
| Grand Junction, CO | 57 | 18 in | A shovel is enough |
| Fruita, CO | 67 | 22 in | A shovel is enough |
| Rifle, CO | 74 | 27 in | Cordless single-stage |
| Glenwood Springs, CO | 79 | 39 in | Gas single-stage |
| Durango, CO | 83 | 64 in | Two-stage snowblower |
| Farmington, NM | 120 | 9 in | A 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 Montrose #2, 1.6 miles from Montrose. 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.
- The two nearest weather stations sit at very different heights, and the second one averages 67 inches a year. Hills around Montrose can get a lot more or less than this.