Golf courses are hosting golfers not cross-country skiers all across Wyoming. Car washes are doing a brisk business. Ranchers are nervously looking toward the mountains wondering about snowpack totals.
Folks, it has been a historically warm winter in Wyoming.
To most of us, this has been great. Hardly anyone has slipped on ice and broken a wrist. Old batteries have not been replaced. No snow days for school districts. Even our interstate highways have been pretty dry.
Chuck Brown in Wheatland said when it is this dry they get record winds. He says it has been warm and windy in southeastern Wyoming.
Ray Hunkins spends his time between Wheatland, Cheyenne, and Arizona. He had this to say: “I won't say, I told you so, but check my prediction in your column on predictions for the new year. If this pattern doesn't change, agri-business will take a hit, big time. Breeding stock will hit the market because of poor range and little hay and the irrigated farmers won't have irrigation water. Wheat is already a disaster.”
My friend Bryan Neeley told me he spent two grueling hours last Tuesday hauling buckets of water from the still-flowing Baldwin Creek to douse his young trees that he worries could be dead by spring. Normally this time of year in Lander everything would be white and temperatures would be sub-zero. It was in the 60s on two days this week. In February!
Also in Lander, John B. Brown offered this: “The lowest temperature recorded so far at my house in Red Canyon so far this Winter is -5 degrees on January 24th at 7:33 a.m. Normally, I would have seen a few days below -20 degrees by now. This warm weather has really thrown me and my wife for a loop. One of the reasons I left the East coast behind was to experience real winters again. The joke’s on me as that recent large storm dumped 13” of snow and ice where I used to live in Delaware. It’s also MUCH colder there than it is here. Crazy times.”
Dean McKee spends a lot of time snowmobiling on Togwotee Pass and reflected on the warm winter: “Weird year! TV weather this morning said Lander is 36 inches below the average snowfall to date this winter. They added that is for the time period 7/1/2025 to now.”
Winters Have Personalities
The weather in my town of Lander has a personality much like that across the state of Wyoming: It is a Jekyll and Hyde, up and down, warm and cold, dry or wet, windy or calm, sort of existence.
I used to claim that Wyoming had the normal four seasons of Almost Winter, Winter, Still Winter, and Construction.
Instead, my 90-year-old friend Del McOmie of Lander says we usually have 12 seasons:
1. Winter
2. Arctic Freeze
3. Second winter
4. Spring of Deception
5. Semi-Truck tipping season
6. Sprinter
7. Actual spring (lasts two weeks)
8. Construction season
9. Torrential downpour
10. Cheyenne Frontier Days - hail season
11. Summer
12. Pre-Winter - Fall Snow
So far, we have had Pre-Winter and, well, we are still waiting for the big blast to come.
Wyoming Voted Number-One
Normally, we would be screaming about how bad the highways are this time of year.
A few years ago, Wyoming was voted the No. 1 for being the most dangerous state to drive in during winter weather. The nine other worst states for winter driving are: 2. Vermont 3. Montana 4. Idaho 5. Maine 6. Michigan 7. Iowa 8. New Mexico 9. Minnesota and 10. Nebraska. Not sure why Colorado was missed from this list.
One of the deepest, darkest secrets about the Cowboy State is that winter driving can be easy – most of the time.
We have spent a lifetime driving Wyoming roads and the key is just watching and avoiding bad weather if you can. This year it has been easy. Way too easy.
The combination of incredibly accurate winter weather forecasting and fantastic systems in place by the Wyoming Department of Transportation (WYDOT) can make travel easy during winter months.
The two best innovations in recent years are those digital message boards across the state foretelling what kind of weather you can find ahead of you and the cameras giving you a real-time image of what is ahead.
Weather forecasting has become an exact science these days. If it says it’s going to snow 6 inches, you can pretty much expect a half foot of the white stuff.
Record High Temps
According to a Cowboy State Daily news story by Andrew Rossi, data collected across Wyoming shows temperatures were between 2 and 13 degrees warmer than average in December and January, making it the warmest start to winter ever. If that trend doesn't change in February, the 2025-2026 winter might be beyond rescue.
He quoted Meteorologist Noah Myers with NWS Riverton who confirmed that the 2025-2026 winter season has been the “warmest” across most of western and central Wyoming.
Rossi reported Cheyenne was over 2 degrees warmer than average in January, while Laramie and Rawlins were almost 5 degrees warmer than average. Laramie and Rawlins also set records for their ninth-driest January.
Two dominant factors have kept Wyoming’s winter this warm: a lack of snow and a lack of cold air.
“Snow keeps temperatures down,” he said. “When we get early-season snowstorms, we stay much colder than we would otherwise. Without that snow, we just can't stay that cold,” according to the Cowboy State Daily report.
“Most of the winter storm systems have been going east,” Myers said. “The western U.S. has been, on average, warmer than normal, but that’s opposite as you get into the Midwest and eastern states. There were snow flurries in Florida last week.”
Without snow on the ground, the air over Wyoming has gotten warmer than average. That warmth has prevented cold, moist air from reaching the Rocky Mountain Region, keeping it warmer and drier than average.
“It just seems intuitive, but we are not having a normal winter,” Myers said.
