Do you need a snowblower in The Dalles, OR?
Your answer for The Dalles
A shovel is enough
A normal winter drops about 0.7 tons of snow on this driveway in The Dalles, 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 The Dalles is light enough for one.
A normal The Dalles winter
- Snow a year
- 6 in
- Storms of 5 in or more
- 0.4 a winter
- Storms of 10 in or more
- about once every 10 winters
- Days with snow on the ground
- 19
Light, below most snowy cities. A typical snowy US city gets about 5.0 times as much. It tends to stay, so each storm lands on the last one.
On a two car driveway that is about 0.7 tons of snow to move in a season, and a 10 inch storm weighs 2,600 pounds.
When the snow comes in The Dalles
- Nov0.7
- Dec2.0
- Jan1.9
- Feb0.8
- Mar0.1
Snow worth clearing runs from December to January, heaviest in December. Buy the shovel before the first fall, when stores still have them.
The Dalles and its neighbours
The Dalles is number 13 of 57 Oregon towns here for snowfall; Baker City gets the most at 79 inches.
| Town | Miles | Snow | Two car, paved |
|---|---|---|---|
| Sandy, OR | 56 | 3 in | No snowblower |
| Washougal, WA | 58 | 6 in | A shovel is enough |
| Troutdale, OR | 60 | 3 in | A shovel is enough |
| Camas, WA | 62 | 3 in | A shovel is enough |
| Fairview, OR | 62 | 3 in | A shovel is enough |
| Gresham, OR | 63 | 3 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 The Dalles, 2.6 miles from The Dalles. 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 22 inches a year. Hills around The Dalles can get a lot more or less than this.
- Days with snow on the ground come from a second nearby station, because the closest one does not record snow depth.