SnowfallCheck

Do you need a snowblower in Mountain Home, ID?

Your answer for Mountain Home

A shovel is enough

A normal winter drops about 2.3 tons of snow on this driveway in Mountain Home, 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 Mountain Home is light enough for one.

How much snow Mountain Home gets

Snow a year
18 in
Storms of 5 in or more
0.2 a winter
Storms of 10 in or more
almost never
Days with snow on the ground
17

Light, below most snowy cities. A typical snowy US city gets about 2.0 times as much. It tends to stay, so each storm lands on the last one.

On a two car driveway that is about 2.3 tons of snow to move in a season, and a 10 inch storm weighs 2,600 pounds.

When the snow comes in Mountain Home

  1. Oct0.1
  2. Nov2.0
  3. Dec5.6
  4. Jan5.3
  5. Feb3.3
  6. Mar1.2
  7. Apr0.1

Snow worth clearing runs from November to March, heaviest in December. Buy the shovel before the first fall, when stores still have them.

Mountain Home and its neighbours

Mountain Home is number 20 of 26 Idaho towns here for snowfall; Rexburg gets the most at 70 inches.

TownMilesSnowTwo car, paved
Boise City, ID4218 inA shovel is enough
Kuna, ID4518 inA shovel is enough
Garden City, ID4818 inA shovel is enough
Meridian, ID4818 inA shovel is enough
Eagle, ID5318 inA shovel is enough
Nampa, ID5410 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 Boise Air Terminal, 40.6 miles from Mountain Home. 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.