Monday, August 31, 2026

Golf-ball hail punches north Denver

1951 · Metro Denver (north side) and Boulder

On Aug. 31, 1951, hail up to 1.75 inches across — golf-ball size, in the official vernacular — tore through metro Denver and left about $300,000 in damage. Stapleton measured stones an inch and a half wide. Boulder caught 1.93 inches of rain the same afternoon.

Late August on the Front Range is supposed to be the polite part of summer. 1951 did not get the memo.

National Weather Service notes for the date are short and unsentimental: hail as large as 1 3/4 inches, $300,000 in damage, 1 1/2-inch stones at Stapleton. That is 1951 money. A research paper in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society later mapped two hail cells on the north side of the city that same afternoon, one of them walking with a tornado, and put the roof-and-window bill closer to a million. The southern edge of the swath was a ruler line. Three blocks south of two-inch ice, stations logged a trace of rain and went back to whatever they were doing.

Boulder, twenty-five miles up the road, took the liquid version: 1.93 inches, still the wettest August 31 in the city record. Denver's official gauge stayed dry. That is the Front Range in one paragraph. One neighborhood eats the ice. The next one watches the cloud walk past like it has somewhere better to be.

Coloradans still measure hail the way the rest of the country measures produce — dime, quarter, ping-pong, golf ball, hen egg, baseball. On this date the grocery list stopped at golf ball. Cars dented. Windows opened without anyone touching the latch. The insurance adjusters invented a busy season.

Seventy-five years later the same calendar square still belongs to Hail Alley. The stones have not gotten more polite. Neither has August.

Sources: NWS Denver — August 25–31 weather history notes · AMS Bulletin — Denver hailstorms of Aug. 31, 1951 · Boulder August 31 precipitation record

Marvin Davis is born, then tries to buy Denver a major-league team

1925 · Denver; Aspen

Marvin H. Davis was born Aug. 31, 1925, in Newark and made his first real fortune wildcatting oil out of Denver. He later owned the Aspen Skiing Company, tried to move the Oakland A's to town, and kicked the tires on the Broncos. The teams stayed put. The money did not.

The nickname was "Mr. Wildcatter," which is what you get when you drill more holes in the Rockies than almost anyone who is not named Exxon.

Davis moved the family oil business to Denver in the 1950s and spent the next three decades punching leases across Colorado and Wyoming. By the 1970s Davis Oil was one of the busiest independents in the country. He also bought Denver shopping centers the way other people buy postage stamps. In 1977 he offered Charlie Finley $12 million for the Oakland Athletics with the explicit plan of parking them in Mile High. The deal died in January 1978. He later circled the Broncos the same way and left without the franchise. Denver kept waiting. The teams kept their zip codes.

In 1981 he sold most of the oil book for about $600 million, bought 20th Century Fox, and inherited the Aspen Skiing Corporation as a studio side dish. Fox had purchased SkiCo with Star Wars money in 1978. Davis renamed it the Aspen Skiing Company, spun pieces off, and treated the mountains like another well that might or might not come in. Longtime Aspen president D.R.C. Brown later said Davis milked the place. The Crown family bought him out in the mid-1980s and put the capital back in.

He died in Beverly Hills in 2004, on the Forbes list and a long way from a Denver lease map. The A's eventually did come to town, decades late and by a different door. Davis would have recognized the impulse. He just would have wanted a better working interest.

Sources: Wikipedia — Marvin Davis · New York Times obituary · Aspen Sojourner — ski company timeline

Denver hits 98 and locks up the hottest August on the books

2011 · Denver

On Aug. 31, 2011, Denver reached 98 degrees — tying the date record set in 1960 and sealing what became the hottest August in city history. It was the fifth daily record in eight days. The official call came the next morning, after the night refused to cool.

The high landed at 98. The low refused to drop much past 63. Do that enough times in a row and the month itself starts to sweat.

The Denver Post wrote it up that afternoon from Cherry Creek Reservoir, where someone on a personal watercraft was doing the only sensible thing with a record-tying Tuesday. Five daily highs in eight days. A month that was about to slide past 1937's 76.8-degree average and leave 2007's second-place finish looking like a mild suggestion. The Weather Service made it official Thursday morning. August 2011 still sits on the throne, later tying 2020 for warmest August in the modern book.

Same calendar square as the 1951 hailstorm. Ice one century, a skillet the next. That is the deal you sign when you live at the foot of the mountains and the plains keep sending their weather through the same door.

If today feels like the last exhale of summer, it has company. August 31 has been 46 degrees (2020) and 98 degrees (2011). The average high is a polite 84. The date itself has never agreed to be average.

Sources: Denver Post — Aug. 31, 2011 heat record · Denver August 31 weather records · NWS — 2020 August climate notes tying 2011