After 10 months of almost unprecedented weather, 2026 is on track to be the warmest year in Wyoming’s recorded history.
According to the National Weather Service office in Riverton, nearly every location it monitors averaged 3 to 6 degrees above normal between Jan. 1 and Nov. 8, with some records dating to the 1890s.
That’s led to one of the most appealing autumns in recent memory – or the worst, depending on the location.
Photographer Dave Bell of Pinedale can’t remember a longer, more colorful fall than the one still going on in south-central Wyoming.
“The weather's been unbelievable,” he told Cowboy State Daily. “It started with fall colors, which were unbelievable, and they just lingered and lingered and lingered. Beautiful sunrises, phenomenal days with blue skies, and beautiful sunsets. What more can I say?”
Photographer Laura Redmond of Cody, who’s been exploring northern and central Wyoming, has experienced the exact opposite.
“The color has not been awesome this year,” she said. “It's been pretty, pretty terrible in some places. Cody’s was abysmal, and Jackson didn’t have a fall at all.”
Southern Splendor
Even in mid-November, Bell is still soaking in the autumn splendor. He’s seen some of the best color in years in and around Pinedale.
“I’ve been all over Sublette County photographing mule deer and went to Yellowstone and Grand Teton a couple of times,” he said. “The leaves are almost gone now, but I’ve taken dozens and dozens of photographs of great color, lingering aspens, cottonwood trees, the whole nine yards.”
It also seems to be an unusually good year to see mule deer bucks. The ones Bell has seen passing through Pinedale are among the most impressive he’s ever seen, he said.
“The mule deer migration is at its peak right now, so we have all these beautiful bucks in their prime passing through Pinedale on their way to the Red Desert,” he said. “I've spoken to a lot of people who have lived here a lot longer than me, and they've never seen so many big bucks passing through this area. I don't know why that is, but the bucks are big, and they're beautiful.”
One notable absence this fall has been snow. Bell could only recall one or two mornings when it was cold enough for snow to fall, even if it didn’t stick.
According to NWS Riverton, the average temperature in Big Piney, just south of Pinedale, has been 45.9 degrees, almost 6 degrees warmer than average.
That makes 2026 the warmest year on record for Big Piney.
The wind has also been mostly absent, letting the trees keep their leaves longer. That’s made it a stellar season for Bell.
“We've been at this now for two months,” he said. “First week of September, all of October, and now the first ten days of November? I couldn’t be happier.”
None In The North
Farther north, Redmond hit all her fall-color hot spots between September and early November. She left nearly all of them discouraged and concerned.
“We had quite a bit of color for a week before everything dropped,” she said. “A lot of trees didn't really color out. The leaves dried up and fell off the trees.”
One of Redmond’s go-to locations for fall color is the famous Oxbow Bend in Grand Teton National Park. She traveled there when the riverside aspens and cottonwoods are at their fall peak, hoping to see the expected collage of color.
Instead, she saw all the signs of an ongoing struggle after an unusually warm, dry year.
“Oxbow Bend hardly turned this year,” she said. “Schwabacher’s Landing was about the same. Jackson's is usually one of the best places in the state to go for fall, and they barely had one this year.”
The most worrisome sign Redmond saw was at the famous Mormon Row, which was almost devoid of any grass.
"The ground around the barns is completely sterilized," she said. "I looked at my pictures from last year, and even with all the tourism, there was still grass there. This year, there's no grass, and that's because there was no moisture."
Going back to 1921, Jackson’s average temperature from January to November is 41.1 degrees. This year, the average is 44.7.
NWS Riverton also released precipitation records for its monitoring stations between December 2025 and Nov. 10. Jackson is one of the few locations that received above-average precipitation.
When Redmond went to Yellowstone, she saw the same disappointing story: Little to no color and shockingly little snow.
“Last year, it snowed in Yellowstone for the last three days of the season,” she said. “There was snow on the ground almost everywhere. This year, it rained. There was no snow anywhere.”
By the time Yellowstone closed the East, South, and West entrances for the summer, the park showed no signs of winter. Aside from a few overnight snowstorms that temporarily closed Sylvan Pass and some interior roads, winter weather had yet to settle into northwest Wyoming.
“They closed one road just because they didn't feel like reopening it, not because the snow didn't clear off,” Redmond said.
History’s Lessons
The oldest temperature records maintained by NWS Riverton come from Lander, which go back to 1892.
Between January and November, Lander's average temperature is 48.6 degrees. In 2026, it was 54.2 degrees.
Between December 2025 and Nov. 10, 2026, Lander got 10.04 inches of precipitation, down from its average of 12.81 inches.
That was a flood compared to other locations. Greybull only got 3.48 inches over the same period, down from its average of 3.48 inches, and its average temperature was 4 degrees warmer.
Redmond went to Sinks Canyon State Park during its expected peak color. She said it was “OK.”
Meanwhile, NWS Cheyenne is anticipating a potential record of its own: The latest first snowfall in recorded history.
The latest first snowfall in Cheyenne occurred on Nov. 20, 1900. With nine days left in November and no snow expected for the next week, that record is up for grabs.
Not Surprising
Cowboy State Daily meteorologist Don Day hadn’t crunched the numbers himself, but had no difficulty believing this will go down as one of the warmest years in Wyoming’s history.
“If you look at temperatures starting in January, I don't think we've had a month that's been colder than average this year,” he said. “We had almost no winter, and we’re running out of weeks in the year.”
Day and many other meteorologists are still processing the mea culpa they had to endure after their winter weather forecasts fell through last year.
Because of a relentless series of “logjams” in the Arctic Circle, the predicted snowy, colder winter turned into one of the warmest, driest winters on record for Wyoming and the Rocky Mountain region.
“It was a generational winter,” Day said. “We should only witness a winter like this every 30 or 40 years, but we’d never seen anything of that magnitude in modern times.”
That’s had a direct impact on Wyoming’s trees and fall colors. With the persistent lack of moisture, many trees did what they had to do to survive, which makes fall color more of a liability.
When the first trees started turning in September, Shane Smith, former director of the Cheyenne Botanic Gardens, expected a lackluster fall across most of Wyoming.
“A lot of places in Wyoming had less-than-normal moisture or are experiencing drought,” Smith told Cowboy State Daily. “Even the high country, which usually gets more moisture than lower altitudes, experienced less-than-normal moisture. Besides being hard on stream runoff, and all the implications there, it also triggers earlier coloration of the leaves.”
When trees are stressed by drought, their leaves change and drop sooner. It’s a survival mechanism that helps the tree avoid expending unnecessary resources on dying leaves.
This is especially true for saplings and young trees. Smith noted that the first trees to change and drop their leaves were the smaller aspens growing in the Snowy Range.
“You've got a lot more sun hitting the soil in those areas, which causes more evaporation,” he said. “Those poor little trees are better off if they drop their leaves sooner rather than later. They’re feeling the drier conditions, and there’s little advantage to hanging on longer. It’s just survival.”
Unknowns In The Inevitable
As of Wednesday, temperatures across Wyoming remain above average, with clear skies and daytime highs in the 60s. Overnight lows are barely below freezing, if they get that low at all.
In the meantime, meteorologists are awaiting the impact of the earliest polar vortex in history.
The perpetually circling mass of Arctic air over the North Pole collapsed in late October. Day called the timing “unprecedented.”
“Having a polar vortex happen at the end of November or early December is not unusual,” he said. “Seeing one three weeks earlier than that is pretty significant.”
It usually takes three to four weeks for that polar vortex collapse to descend on Wyoming. That leaves Day and other meteorologists in a predicament when it comes to their forecasts.
“It’s going to happen,” Day said. “The stratospheric warming event has happened, and we're just now in the process of the atmosphere responding to it. The question is when and where it’ll hit.”
Nobody knows how the earlier-than-ever polar vortex will interact with the Super El Niño, which is now settled over the southern U.S. at full force. The unexpected ingredient is an influx of cold air from Greenland, which Day called “an unusual set-up.”
All these factors have given Day some confidence in what’s in store for Wyoming.
Between the incoming polar vortex, the Super El Niño, and the incoming cold air from Greenland, Day said he believes “the trend is going to be colder" in Wyoming.
“Starting next week and into Thanksgiving week, the trends are indicating that colder air is going to come across the U.S., north to south,” he said. “At the same time, we're going to see a really stormy pattern along the West Coast start to move inland. In that situation, it means colder temperatures and increasing chances of precipitation, rain or snow.”
Late, Not Never
Bell wasn’t sure why so many splendid mule deer bucks are passing through Pinedale, but Redmond thinks she might have an explanation. When she visited Yellowstone, she saw signs that the wildlife are dealing with limited food sources.
“You’re going to have more animals in towns this year looking for food because they didn't have their normal food sources,” she said. “There are no berries in Yellowstone. Bears are foraging for food wherever they can.”
Colder, wetter weather in late November won’t fix the dearth of edible plants and fruit throughout Wyoming, which could make the next several months a struggle for Wyoming’s wildlife.
Still, any snow and cold is better late than never, and Day said he’s “pretty confident” true wintry weather will move across Wyoming during the week of Thanksgiving.
“It's too far out to say who's going to be the coldest and snowiest,” he said. “Is there going to be a foot or 3 inches of snow? Is I-80 going to close? I can't tell you any of those things, but I can tell you that the trend for colder, wetter weather is there for the last two weeks in November.”
Andrew Rossi can be reached at arossi@cowboystatedaily.com.
