Cold and wet weather to start the workweek, with First Snow possible
Sunday, September 21, 2025
Temperatures are in the upper sixties with partly sunny skies this Sunday mid-afternoon in Steamboat Springs. An approaching Pacific Northwest storm commemorating the autumnal equinox, which occurs at 2:19 pm on Monday, will bring cool and wet fall weather to start the workweek. Along with showers lingering on a cool Tuesday, we may see the first dusting of snow atop the Steamboat Ski Area on Tuesday morning. But any snowfall won’t last for long as warming temperatures and mostly sunny skies are forecast to start on Wednesday and last into next weekend.
A storm in the Pacific Northwest will move through Idaho tonight and split on Monday, with the southern end of the storm briefly forming an eddy that moves over western Colorado on Tuesday. Weather forecast models have struggled with the evolution of this storm for a while, only recently settling on a further west and wetter solution, as is often the case with Pacific Northwest storms.
We should be able to eke out another seventy-degree day today, right near our average of seventy-one degrees, before cool air begins to filter into the region on Monday. A good chance of thunderstorms will precede the cool air tonight ahead of the storm, with a lesser chance on Monday as high temperatures only reach the mid-sixties.
While the bulk of the storm will move southward to the west of the Continental Divide, showers are likely along and behind a cold front late Monday afternoon or early evening, lasting through the night and into Tuesday. Temperatures up top fall toward freezing overnight and early Tuesday morning, meaning we may see the First Snow of the season atop the Steamboat Ski Area.
While we won’t see those snowflakes in town, we won’t escape the very fall-like weather on Tuesday, with morning showers that may extend into the afternoon and high temperatures mired in the mid-fifties. By Tuesday afternoon, though, the counter-clockwise winds around the eddy to our south will bring gusty easterly winds, drying the air as it downslopes off the Park Range to our east and ending the showers.
The storm is expected to quickly exit the state by Tuesday night, allowing a ridge of high pressure to build overhead starting Wednesday. Clear skies with lots of sun will allow temperatures to rebound into the upper sixties on Wednesday and back into the low seventies for Thursday, beginning a period of quintessential Colorado fall weather that may last through next weekend.
The foliage is rapidly changing, with great color above 9,000′, as shown in the pictures I took while mountain biking at the Steamboat Ski Resort on Saturday, as well as in the lower-elevation drainages. The show should continue through next week, with the views of the high-elevation aspen possibly dependent on the wind associated with the storm. Be sure to take advantage of Colorful Colorado, and I’ll have more weekend details in my next regularly scheduled weather narrative on Thursday afternoon.
