Chilly, Snowy Vermont Aprils: We've Been Down This Road Before

Heavy snow collapsed a partly leafed out tree onto a car in St
Albans, Vermont in late April, 2010

I, like many Vermonters, have been whining about the Arctic winds, the forecasts of snow (like the dusting to three inches in the forecast for later today and tonight.) and the seeming absense of spring.

But it's been worse than this in past Aprils, often much worse, and we've endured.

Actually, this April's cold and snow in Vermont has so far been concentrated south and west of us, and we haven't gotten the worst of it.  And it can be brutal during a Vermont April, let me tell ya.

I'll give a couple examples, some from David Ludlum's Vermont Weather Book, some from the National Weather Service and some from my weather geeky memories.

Here we go, in no particular order:

1807: A big snowstorm on April 1 dumped 30 inches of snow on Danville, leavingthe total depth of snow on the ground at 60 inches. Montpelier had nearly four feet of snow on the gronnd.

Heavy wet snow crushes a partly leafed out, bloom budding lilac
bush in my St. Albans, Vermont yard, late April, 2010. The bush recovered.

1975: A big storm that began on April 2 dumped two feet of snow on Enosburg Falls and 21 inches in Manchester.  April, 1975 turned out to be the fourth coldest on record in Burlington.

As proof that awful springs can have a nice and welcome turnaround, May 1975 was the second warmest on record at that time. (There has since been one more warmer May, in 2015.)

1911: More proof that a bad April can have a nice turnaround to spring, eventually. Subzero temperatures were pretty common in northern Vermont in early April, 1911.

That May turned to be among the hottest on record, and in July, Vermont had one of its most intense heat waves on record. The state record for the hottest temperature on record, 105 degrees in Vernon was established in July, 2011. So be careful what you wish for.

1874: Let's get back to Aprils that were much more terrible than this one so far. That year -1874 - there was a snowstorm every week of the month in Vermont. On April 30, 1874, Woodstock, Vermont got 10 inches of new storm. The snow total for the month  there was 49 inches.

1972: April in Vermont was like March that year. Burlington by far had its coldest April with an average temperature of just 35.6 degrees. It got down to just 2 degrees on April 7 that year. On that date, there was still 39 inches of snow on the ground in Peru, Vermont.

1983: Burlington received 15.6 inches of snow pretty late in the month - April 17. It was the city's largest April snowstorm on record.

By the way, if you're disappointed by snow in today's forecast, remember it pretty much always snows in Vermont during April. Burlington's records date back to the 1880s. I could only find two years - 1941 and 2005 - when there wasn't at least a trace of snow in the Queen City during April. The average snowfall for the month of April in the Champlain Valley is around four inches.

The snow total in that white April of 1983 was 21.3 inches. As recently as 2000, we had 19 inches of snow during the month of April. Back in 2010, after a very warm start to the month in which the leaves came out amid 80 degree temperatures,  as much as a foot of snow fell around St. Albans and other sections of northwestern Vermont. The snow accumulated on the leaves, causing a LOT of tree damage, as you can see in the photos within this post.

Three days after that late April, 2010 snowstorm in St. Albans, the temperature was back up to 80 degrees.

All this is proof that you just can't trust April if you want spring in Vermont.