Thursday, September 3, 2026

Denver's earliest snow arrives before Labor Day

1961 · Denver and the Front Range foothills

On Sunday, Sept. 3, 1961, Stapleton Airport measured 4.2 inches of snow — still Denver's earliest measurable snowfall on record. Western suburbs and the foothills picked up nearly a foot. Labor Day Monday woke up to slush, broken limbs, and a high that never made it out of the 50s.

The unofficial end of summer is supposed to smell like charcoal. In 1961 it smelled like wet elm.

A winter-like system parked on the Front Range the Sunday before Labor Day. The official stick at Stapleton Airport recorded 4.2 inches, enough to bury the previous earliest mark — a trace on Sept. 4, 1951 — and to make old-timers tell the papers this was the earliest heavy snow they could remember. They were right. The Weather Bureau had been keeping score since 1872. The thermometer sat at 33 degrees from 6 to 9 a.m., the coldest Sept. 3 on the books and the coldest reading that early in any season. The day's high was 45. The average high for the date is 83.

The snow was heavy and wet because the trees were still fully leafed. Limbs came down across the metro. Como, 76 miles southwest in Park County, looked like January. Loveland Pass took 12 to 14 inches. Southwest of the city, campers near Westcliffe had to be plowed out of as much as three feet. Statewide, the freeze dinged the late pinto-bean crop for about a million 1961 dollars.

The punch line lives one year earlier. On Sept. 3, 1960, Denver hit 94 degrees. Same calendar square, opposite personality. Denver's average first measurable snow is mid-October. September flakes have gotten rarer since, which is why locals still pack both sandals and a scraper and refuse to apologize for either.

If you had a pool party planned, the pool won. The snow just invited itself.

Sources: Denver Post — Sept. 3, 1961 snowfall recap · NWS / Denver Post — earliest Denver snows · FOX31 — September snow dates · ThorntonWeather — NWS week-of-Sept. 3 notes

Denver Water starts filling Dillon Reservoir

1963 · Dillon, Summit County

On Sept. 3, 1963, Denver Water began storing water behind the new Dillon Dam. The town of Dillon had already been moved uphill. The Blue River started becoming the largest tank in Denver's system — about a third of the city's storage, tunneled under the Continental Divide toward the South Platte.

Denver's thirst has a long memory and a short patience. By the 1950s the Water Board already owned most of the Blue River valley's rights and a lot of the land under what is now a lake. Residents of old Dillon were told to sell and leave. Buildings that could move, moved. The rest were burned or dismantled. Contrary to the ghost-story version, there is no intact downtown down there — foundations and old roads, maybe, and a lot of cold water.

The dam is an earth-fill wall 5,888 feet long and 231 feet above the stream bed, with a morning-glory spillway at 9,017 feet. When Denver opened the gates on Sept. 3, 1963, it was not a ribbon-cutting so much as a bookkeeping entry: water withheld on the Blue, an exchange release from Williams Fork into the Colorado to keep senior rights whole. Storage paused on Nov. 20 that year, then started again the next May under the Blue River decrees.

What you see from I-70 now — 3,233 acres, 26.8 miles of shoreline, sailboats against the Tenmile Range — is Denver's largest reservoir, roughly 250,000 acre-feet. The Harold D. Roberts Tunnel carries a typical year's 60,000 acre-feet 23 miles under the Divide and drops it into the South Platte basin. That is how a Summit County valley became a Denver tap.

The new town of Dillon watched from the hill. The old one learned to float as an idea.

Sources: Colorado State Engineer — 1964 water report (Dillon storage began Sept. 3, 1963) · Wikipedia — Dillon Reservoir · Wikipedia — Timeline of Denver (filling begins Sept. 3, 1963) · Summit Daily — moving the town of Dillon

Colorado Midland puts standard-gauge trains into Leadville

1887 · Colorado City to Leadville via Buena Vista

By Sept. 3, 1887, the Colorado Midland was running regular service from Colorado City to Leadville. It was the first standard-gauge railroad built over the Continental Divide in Colorado — James J. Hagerman's expensive argument that three-foot track was not the only way through the Sawatch.

James John Hagerman came to Colorado Springs to die of tuberculosis and then declined the assignment. Instead he raised eastern money and pointed a railroad at his Aspen mines.

The Midland was incorporated in 1883 and built west from Colorado City up Ute Pass, over Hayden Divide and Trout Creek Pass, then down to the Arkansas and north to Leadville. Rails reached the Cloud City on Aug. 31, 1887. Passenger and freight service followed at once. Colorado's official timeline marks Sept. 3 as the day regular trains were running Colorado City to Leadville via Buena Vista.

West of town the real stunt was already in the mountain. The Hagerman Tunnel, finished that June, punched 2,100 feet through the Sawatch at about 11,530 feet — then the highest railroad tunnel on earth — after four lariat loops, two tall wooden trestles, and eight snowsheds. A few years later the lower Busk-Ivanhoe Tunnel made the same divide less theatrical and more survivable.

The line was brutal to operate. Grades of 3 and 4 percent, almost no level track, and winters that ate rotary plows for breakfast. It still did the job the 1880s asked of it: ore down, machinery up, tourists out to pick wildflowers by the armful. The Midland is gone. The grade is a jeep road and a rumor. Leadville kept the altitude.

Sources: Wikipedia — Timeline of Colorado history · Wikipedia — Colorado Midland Railway · Colorado Springs Pioneers Museum — Midland Railway · Colorado Central Magazine — Hagerman Pass