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December is Denver’s coldest month and 3rd snowiest

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December is Denver’s coldest month and 3rd snowiest


DENVER — December is a festive month as the holiday season goes into high gear. And perhaps we have only this month where snow is a welcome site. But how much snow should we expect in Denver in December? The short answer: not as much as you might think.

However, what we lack in snowfall, we make up with cold temperatures as the monthly mean for Denver is only 30 degrees. It’s Denver’s coldest month. And when we say cold, we mean c-cold!

The coldest it has ever gotten in Denver in December was -25 degrees. That bone-chilling temperature was recorded on both the 24th of 1876 and the 22nd of 1990.

The daily normal high temperatures for December hold fairly constant starting with a high of 45 degrees and ending the month with a normal high of 43 degrees, according to the National Weather Service.

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For low temperatures, December in Denver begins with a normal low of 19 degrees and finishes with a low of 17 degrees. But it’s not always cold outside, baby.

The warmest temperature ever recorded during December was 79 degrees on the 5th in 1939. That’s not a very festive temperature, but nearly 80 degrees in December does sound nice.

Let it snow!

And what about the white stuff? Well, December is Denver’s third snowiest month. We only collect, on average, 8.5 inches of snow. But the month is capable of producing some big storms, like the record-breaking snowfall we got in 1913.

Starting on the first of the month and ending on the 5th of that year, the heaviest and longest-duration snowstorm in Denver’s history dumped a total of 45.7 inches of snow!

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That 1913 storm shut down the city for days and it wasn’t fully back on its feet for an entire month, according to the Denver Library Genealogy, African American & Western History Resources. City workers removed roughly six billion cubic feet of snow!

An article written by Brian K. Trembath on the library’s website states the event caught the city off-guard. It started with just a few inches a day, but by the fourth day, it began to dump, shutting down the city’s entire streetcar system.

“Fortunately, Denver’s other utilities, including phone systems, the electrical grid, and the water system worked without major problems,” Tremboth wrote.

Photos on the Denver Library’s archive show just how much snow fell and how the city dealt with what — unbeknownst to them at the time — would be the city’s biggest snowstorm.

Denver Library

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People walk down a shoveled pathway on a residential street in Denver, Colorado after the snowstorm of 1913. Shows snow packed lawns and snow covered houses.
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Denver Library

View of the Denver City Tramway Company Lawrence Street trolley in the great snowstorm of 1913 in Denver, Colorado. Shows cars numbered, “95,” “(?)85,” and “(?)8.”
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Denver Library

View of men shoveling snow in front of the Denver Public Library on West Colfax and Bannock Street after the great snowstorm of 1913 in Denver, Colorado. Shows horse-drawn wagons, men, and the Capitol building.

What about are least snowiest December? In 1995, not one significant snowfall was recorded for the entire month in Denver. Here are five other Decembers where barely any snow fell:

  1. 0.1″ 1928
  2. 0.4″ 1890
  3. 0.5″ 1935
  4. 0.7″ 1977
  5. 0.7″ 1895

An El Nino winter?

You may have heard after three winters of cooler than average water conditions, we now have “warmer” and that’s called El Nino out in the Pacific Ocean. The El Nino effect puts a lot of energy into the atmosphere and it tends to change how the jet stream flows.

With the El Nino climate pattern, we tend to get more of a split Jet stream and more of a west to east flow. That is important because that tends to block the colder air up in Canada and we can get fewer Arctic outbreaks.

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Mike Nelson has the 30-day outlook in the video below:

December weather outlook


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Denver, CO

Denver Health ambulance with patient onboard involved in crash in Englewood

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Denver Health ambulance with patient onboard involved in crash in Englewood


ENGLEWOOD, Colo. — A Denver Health ambulance with a patient onboard was involved in a crash in Englewood Tuesday afternoon.

The crash happened around 4:30 p.m. at Logan St and the Hampden Bypass. According to Denver Health, the ambulance was transporting a patient to Swedish Medical Center when the crash occurred.

According to Denver Health, three additional ambulances were dispatched to the scene. One took the initial patient to Swedish Medical Center. The other two ambulances were for new patients who were involved in the crash.

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Denver Health could not share how many additional patients there were or if the initial patient was injured in the crash.

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The cause of the crash is under investigation.

This is a developing story.


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Suspect arrested after man shot to death outside Denver Rescue Mission

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Suspect arrested after man shot to death outside Denver Rescue Mission


DENVER — Police in Denver arrested a suspect in connection with the fatal shooting of a man outside the Denver Rescue Mission Monday night.

Officers arrested Julian Huggins, 40, at the homeless shelter in the 4600 block of E. 48th Avenue shortly after arriving on scene around 8 p.m.

The male victim, whose name has not been released, was pronounced dead at the scene, according to the police.

Witnesses told police that the Huggins and the victim were involved in a verbal altercation before shots rang out.

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Huggins is being held on suspicion of first-degree murder.


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Rent-free housing: Denver real estate firm donates apartments to 10 early-career teachers

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Rent-free housing: Denver real estate firm donates apartments to 10 early-career teachers


Sign up for Chalkbeat Colorado’s free daily newsletter to get the latest reporting from us, plus curated news from other Colorado outlets, delivered to your inbox.

Ten early-career Denver classroom teachers will get free rent for a year in a new upscale apartment building in the northwest part of the city — a novel, if incremental, approach to the problem of rising housing costs making it difficult for teachers to live close to where they work.

Real estate investment firm Grand Peaks, whose founders attended Denver Public Schools, are donating 10 apartments in the 533-unit Skyline at Highlands development in the Jefferson Park neighborhood. The teachers will be able to live there rent-free from August through next July.

Sara Hazel, the president and CEO of the Denver Public Schools Foundation, said the foundation chose the 10 teachers in a random drawing from among about 215 who applied. Only classroom teachers with zero to three years of experience were eligible.

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“I got to have my Oprah moment sending emails to these 10 winners and sharing the wonderful news,” Hazel said. “The response we’ve gotten — the quotes are, ‘This is life changing for my family.’ ‘You have no idea how much this means to me.’”

Marc Swerdlow, president of Grand Peaks, said the company’s founders, the Simpson family, wanted to do something for Denver teachers after reading news about pay disparities and the struggle to find affordable housing. The average apartment rent in the gentrifying city was $1,875 a month in the first quarter of this year, the Denver Post reported.

“This property is not an affordable-housing project, but something we could do to provide affordable housing to teachers seemed so easy, so natural,” Swerdlow said.

The hope is that increasing access to affordable housing will incentivize early-career teachers to stay in Denver and in the teaching profession, Hazel said.

“Affordable housing is one of the barriers our Denver teachers are facing — and Denver teachers living in the Denver community is good for Denver and good for our students,” she said. “We hope other companies look at this and are like, ‘Wow, how do we replicate this?’”

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Five of the apartments are studios that would otherwise rent for between $1,725 and $1,900 a month. The other five are one-bedrooms that would rent for between $2,300 and $2,450 a month. The salary for first-year Denver teachers this past year was $54,141.

DPS leaders have floated the idea of providing teacher housing several times in recent years, but no projects have come to fruition. In 2018, the district scrapped the idea of converting a then-empty elementary school into rental apartments for educators after neighbors pushed back. The district leased the building, the former Rosedale Elementary, to the Archdiocese of Denver instead. It now houses Saint John Paul the Great Catholic High School.

Melanie Asmar is the bureau chief for Chalkbeat Colorado. Contact Melanie at masmar@chalkbeat.org.

Denver 7+ Colorado News Latest Headlines | July 2, 7am

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