We are entering the spring season here in the Kootenays, a time when the weather is supposed to be somewhat unpredictable. But this year our whole winter has been kind of strange- and our spring is setting up to be equally odd.
The missing snow
The Kootenay region is a place with an actual winter season. Typically I have observed the temperatures drop below freezing in the November timeframe and start to warm up a bit in February. There are lots of ‘warm, sunny, +5’ days each winter, but most days are on the border of freezing. Most notably, where we are at least, it is normal to have a good base of about 60 cm or so of snow by December. The snow is regularly replenished before starting to melt “for good” by sometime in February.
This season we had one big dump of about 20 cm of snow in November and basically nothing significant since. Bare grass started to peak through during December, and I began to worry a bit about the upcoming summer and fire season. No snow pack means dry ground by June or July instead of by August- that is worrisome.
Bare grass in January
January and the first half of February remained dry with barely any snow fall. We had lots of days with temperatures in the mid single digits, meaning what little snow we had melted away. Our yard has been entirely bare grass since sometime early in January with not even a speck of snow to be seen on the ground.
Also missing from the usual pattern was our week of ‘extreme’ cold that we normally get in early January. This brings with it temperatures of -15 to -20 degrees C for about a week, and has been a regular ‘feature’ of our Januarys every year since moving here.
This regular annual cold snap has become particularly memorable for us since it is often accompanied by some freezing pipes in our basement. We even invested several thousand dollars this past fall for extra insulation on the walls. But with no cold temperatures, the benefits of the insulation remain theoretical.
Snow comes back in February
Now we have arrived in the third week of February, and suddenly there is snow. We’ve received two dumps of about 25 cm each in the past week, with a thorough melting in between.
Snow is not at all unheard of in February in the Kootenays. The only thing that really makes it seem “strange” is the lack of snow during the rest of this winter season. It is definitely… odd- we should have had this much snow all season.
Temperatures are also odd this week: -1 as a high today, but then we should have +7 as highs by the end of the weekend. Not gigantic variability like what is seen on the prairie region, but odd for our locale at this time of the year.
The weird weather this winter is causing us no suffering, but it is unusual in my experience. Mostly I am concerned about what it may mean later in the year as the forest soil begins to dry out with no replenishing moisture from the usual snowpack we should have. The official snowpack reports are showing 105% and 111% of normal accumulations for the West and East Kootenay regions respectively, with Boundary at 95%, which seems like good news to me.
But down at lower altitudes the snow has definitely not been accumulating, and whatever is going on now in February is just strange to my experience. Hopefully 2026 is a good safe year with moist soil and little fire activity, and we can just remember this as the “winter with no snow” or something similarly dramatic.
