On Christmas Day 2023, Whitefish Mountain Resort was still in its opening weeks of winter operations when managers paused the ski area’s uphill travel policy, hoping to preserve what little snowpack clung to the south-facing front side of Big Mountain. Skiers were forced to download the chairlift at the end of the ski day in order to return to the base, including during the busiest week of the season. With a base of 36 inches at 6,737 feet, the mountain’s scant snowpack hardly rivaled that of the valley floors across northwest Montana. In nearby Glacier National Park, monitoring instruments reported under an inch of snow at elevations of 4,500 feet.
Across Montana, most river basins reported less than 60% of normal snowpack conditions on New Year’s Day 2024 while the snow water equivalent (SWE) – the amount of water in the snowpack – at Marias Pass was the lowest it had been in 89 years. The Sun-Teton-Marias River basin’s snowpack near the Rocky Mountain Front was 25% of normal while average temperatures were roughly 10 degrees warmer than average.
“It was definitely a slow start by January 1 – there was basically a meter of snow at most of our upper and mid elevations,” Flathead Avalanche Center Director Blase Reardon said. “I don’t think people were [backcountry skiing] in the Middle Fork much until mid-January, which is pretty late.”
While rumors circulated among skiing and boating communities that the 2023-2024 winter was one of the worst snow years on record, data shows that upper elevations in the Flathead River basin reached a normal snowpack of 80% by its peak in May compared to years past. But the absence of low elevation snow that limited backcountry travel and carpeted the Flathead Valley in brown instead of a veil of winter white created the illusion that there was an almost complete absence of snow.
“That’s the worst access and the slowest start to the season that I remember in my time here,” said Reardon, who has been in the Flathead Valley on and off since the 1990s.
Historically, forecasters recall many seasons over the last few decades where northwest Montana saw some exceptionally dry years, but the timeframe between 2001 and 2005 was the most notable, with experts describing it as incomparable to the recent dry winters.
“There wasn’t a single piece of the state that wasn’t covered in some form of drought through that time,” said LeeAnn Allegretto, a hydrologist and meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Missoula.
Following dry conditions that began in 2001, 56% of Montana was in an extreme drought while 12% was in exceptional drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.
Farmers in Montana called the harvest season in 2001, “the worst year ever” while Great Falls experienced one of its most prolonged droughts on record. Newspaper headlines in the eastern part of the state declared residents were “Praying for Snow” and highlighted the severity of the drought. Ranchers described conditions as drier than during the Dust Bowl days of the Great Depression.
“We had wells going dry that have been in production for 70 years,” a rancher told the Billings Gazette in November of 2001.
Earlier that May, the U.S. Department of Agriculture classified all 56 Montana counties under drought disaster status while the Kootenai National Forest issued rare fishing restrictions on the Fisher and Yaak rivers.
The following December, operators of the Kerr Dam raised Flathead Lake’s water level more than two feet higher than in the previous years to stockpile water. The year before, the lake could not maintain full-pool at two feet below its full elevation of 2,893 feet, which drew criticism from businesses and lake-shore residents who couldn’t launch their boats.
Two decades later, history repeated itself when the water level in June of 2023 reached an all-time low for that time of year, according to U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) data, with surface water levels reaching 2,892.1 feet.
Below-average precipitation in northwest Montana combined with an above-average melt rate in 2023 led to an early runoff. That spring, several weather stations northwest of Flathead Lake only received 4 to 7 inches of precipitation, about 50% of normal and the lowest on record. By May, the snowpack in the Whitefish and Flathead ranges melted out a month earlier than normal, with some high-elevation weather stations not seeing a single day with a low temperature below freezing. The Stahl Peak SNOTEL set a record for melting out on May 31.
According to USGS data, the Middle Fork Flathead River in 2023 dropped below 7,000 cubic feet per second (cfs) by June 1 and fell below 1,000 cfs by mid-July, a level that is usually not seen until late August or September.
But while the following year’s shallow snowpack triggered concern, springtime precipitation in 2024 helped boost streamflows, and the Middle Fork didn’t drop below 1,000 cfs until mid-August.
“For summer streamflows, about 50% to 80% is from the snowpack but also 20% to 30% is from spring precipitation and then 5% to 15% is from soil moisture,” said Eric Larson, a USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service (NRCS) water supply specialist. “If you have a low snow year and you supplement that with spring precipitation and you have a wet fall, soil moisture could be recharged, and it could help things in the spring.”
While flows didn’t drop drastically last year, fisheries managers in northwest Montana took an unprecedented step of imposing angling restrictions on the North Fork Flathead River after USGS streamgages registered consecutive days of water temperatures that exceeded 66 degrees, a temperature threshold above which creates stress for native westslope cutthroat trout.
Flathead Rivers Alliance Director Sheena Pate says while most recreationists abided by the voluntary fishing restrictions, the warm temperatures put added pressure on the region’s native fish as the nonprofit conservation organization worked to educate the public.
“People are understanding of just how unique this fishery is,” Pate said. “We just really have to protect these fisheries and as climate change happens, the waters are warming and that really puts pressure on the fisheries. If you add recreationists on top of it – it’s finding that balancing act.”
As low snowpack and warm temperatures expedite runoff, Pate says it also adds congestion to certain river reaches that have higher volumes. Upper sections of the Middle Fork Flathead River, for example, have a lower water volume than the popular whitewater section from Moccasin Creek to West Glacier, resulting in a shorter season.
“Recreationists are getting more concentrated in the lower sections versus historically when it was a bit more stretched out,” Pate said. “It changes the user experience and adds stressors to the resource.”
While the three forks of the Flathead River system appeared to dry up early over the last few years, Allegretto said northwest Montana fared much better than the rest of the state, with the Flathead River basin’s SWE levels rising to 130% in July last year.
But to the south, the Blackfoot River’s streamflows dropped to record-breaking lows.
“That was historically low,” Allegretto said. “The Blackfoot was the lowest tenth percentile for low flows and it’s still not doing great. The Blackfoot is still suffering and it’s in extreme drought.”
By September, the Blackfoot River’s water temperature rose to nearly 60 degrees while the streamflow dropped to 362 cfs, compared to the median of 650 cfs.
In addition to limited precipitation and warm water temperatures, Allegretto said air temperatures across Montana were an average of 2 to 4 degrees warmer during 2024.
“We’re definitely seeing a trend to more extreme temperature swings,” Allegretto said. “That’s becoming more apparent. La Niñas don’t look the same and El Niño’s don’t look the same.”
Despite the last three winters being classified as La Niña seasons, NWS meteorologist Dave Noble said the storm track has missed northwest Montana.
For example, a series of atmospheric rivers at the end of 2024 targeted Canada while Kalispell remained under high pressure as the jet stream stayed north and contributed to unseasonably warm temperatures. December saw an average high of 37 degrees Fahrenheit in Kalispell compared to 31 degrees.
“For a La Niña winter, above-normal precipitation tends to be more pronounced in the mountains than in the valleys,” Noble said. “Other global climate patterns, such as the Madden-Julian Oscillation, may have also played a role in shaping this season’s drier conditions, which can influence how El Niño and La Niña evolve, potentially impacting our precipitation patterns.”
But interspersed between northwest Montana’s drought periods, there have also been years of deep snowpack that enforce a cyclical balance between stretches of drought, which meteorologists say is typical.
During a deep snowpack year in 1997, the weather station on Mount Allen, which sits at an elevation of 5,300 feet in Glacier National Park, recorded a snow depth of 128 inches by May after exceeding average SWE levels by more than 50% throughout the season.
That same year, more than 400 inches of snow fell on Big Mountain – a record that wasn’t broken again until 407 inches fell during the 2016-2017 season, which some locals called one of the best seasons they’ve ever had.
While deep winters sometimes translate into exceptionally high runoff in the spring, historic floods in the Flathead Valley occurred during unexceptional snow years.
The flood of 1964, for example, resulted from more than a foot of rain over two days in June and caused the streamgage on the Flathead River in Columbia Falls to spike to 25.58 feet, shattering an 1894 record of 19.7 feet. Locals remember seeing dead animals floating down the river and the water destroyed homes and infrastructure across the valley. The Flathead River streamgage measured 176,000 cfs compared to its mean flow of about 25,600 cfs.
According to a report released after the flood, precipitation between January and April of 1964 was normal, but it nearly doubled in May. The flood inflicted more than $24 million worth of damage west of the Continental Divide and nearly 400 homes in Kalispell, Evergreen and Columbia Falls were flooded.
More than 50 years later, Flathead County experienced another abnormal flooding event, with the Flathead River streamgage recording 42,000 cfs in June of 2022. A record amount of daily rain was measured that month at 2.07 inches in Kalispell while the Noisy Basin SNOTEL site in the Swan Range received more than three feet of snow.
That June, the Yellowstone River flooded in southwest Montana, wiping out roads and bridges, and prompting Yellowstone National Park closures at all entrances. Residents in Livingston and Red Lodge were evacuated and inhabitants of Gardiner at the northern entrance of the park were trapped due to road damage.
“It’s all kind of cyclical,” Allegretto said.