DENVER — You’ve probably heard the phrase “colder than hell,” and if you were anywhere near Fraser overnight, you might agree with that assessment.
That’s because the small mountain community of Fraser, located between Granby and Winter Park in Grand County, registered a low of 44 degrees below zero overnight, a parting “hurrah!” from a shallow arctic mass which brought bitterly cold temperatures to the high country as well as the Front Range.
“It’s not unheard of,” said Bruno Rodriguez, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service (NWS) in Boulder, who spoke with Denver7 Tuesday about these extremely cold temperatures. “Usually, every couple of years, maybe, on average, we'll see a cold snap of this intensity. To have one like this per year, or every couple of years, is fairly typical for our area.”
Especially so for the Fraser River Valley, Rodriguez said, as that’s a very well-known cold spot where low temperatures typically drop 20 below zero on “dozens of nights” each year because of its location – the area is surrounded by higher terrain, which sort of acts as a lid that traps any cold air mass that settles in.
You can see that effect in the overnight lows registered by the NWS, with areas near Granby recording lows between -28 and -37 degrees.
And that’s without factoring in wind chill, which drops those low temperatures even further.
“We saw several stations above 10,000 feet report wind chill values below -60 degrees and in one case, all the way down to -64 degrees just east of the Continental Divide last night,” Rodriguez said.
While this departing arctic mass won’t tell us much about what’s in store for us in the next coming months (March is Colorado’s snowiest month, on average – and who knows what’ll happen with La Niña at play), Rodriguez said the good news is that the snowpack in the mountains has begun to creep up a bit closer to average values for this time of year.
The USDA’s Natural Resources Conservation Center shows that as of 12 a.m. Tuesday, snowpack statewide is 90% of median, with every major basin showing values below 100% except for the South Platte River Basin, which currently stands at 101% of median.
That’s “great news,” according to Rodriguez, who said the state has a few more opportunities for additional storm systems over the next couple of weeks, “so hopefully we can see that snow continue to pile up in the high country, which will obviously be beneficial come spring.”
As to whether Fraser will take the spot for the coldest place in the U.S. for Tuesday, Jan. 21, that remains to be seen, Rodriguez said, due to a lag in station data from other parts of the country.
If it holds up, NWS officials said, it “very well may end up being the coldest temperature nationwide today (and yes that includes interior Alaska).”
Denver7 is committed to making a difference in our community by standing up for what's right, listening, lending a helping hand and following through on promises. See that work in action, in the videos above.