Do you need a snowblower in Yakima, WA?
The machine for a Yakima driveway
A shovel is enough
A normal winter drops about 2.6 tons of snow on this driveway in Yakima, 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 Yakima is light enough for one.
A normal Yakima winter
- Snow a year
- 20 in
- Storms of 5 in or more
- 0.7 a winter
- Storms of 10 in or more
- about once every 10 winters
- Days with snow on the ground
- 26
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 2.6 tons of snow to move in a season, and a 10 inch storm weighs 2,600 pounds.
When the snow comes in Yakima
- Oct0.1
- Nov3.0
- Dec7.7
- Jan6.2
- Feb2.7
- Mar0.6
Snow worth clearing runs from November to February, heaviest in December. Buy the shovel before the first fall, when stores still have them.
Yakima and its neighbours
Yakima is number 7 of 91 Washington towns here for snowfall; Spokane gets the most at 45 inches.
| Town | Miles | Snow | Two car, paved |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ellensburg, WA | 28 | 20 in | A shovel is enough |
| Sunnyside, WA | 32 | 10 in | A shovel is enough |
| Grandview, WA | 39 | 10 in | A shovel is enough |
| East Wenatchee, WA | 58 | 17 in | A shovel is enough |
| West Richland, WA | 59 | 2 in | No snowblower |
| Wenatchee, WA | 59 | 17 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 Yakima Air Terminal, 1.6 miles from Yakima. 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.