Old Farmer’s Almanac Winter Forecast 2026–2027: What’s Predicted for Colorado’s Snowfall

Back in July, I made you a promise. The winter map wasn't out yet, so I told you to check back in a few weeks.

The few weeks are up, and the Old Farmer's Almanac finally quit stalling.

The 2027 edition is on shelves, and this time it actually has a winter to talk about.

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What The Old Farmer's Almanac Predicts For Colorado This Winter

Short version for the Western Slope: warmer and wetter.

We sit in the almanac's Intermountain zone alongside Utah and Wyoming, and the call for our region is above-normal snowfall riding on top of a season that runs a touch warm. The heaviest dumps are penciled in for late November, late December, and early February.

If you want to know when to actually be nervous about the driveway, circle mid-to-late December, both ends of January, and early February. Those are the cold snaps.

The Grand Mesa would happily take every flake of it. Powderhorn too.

Why El Niño Is Running Colorado's Winter This Year

The engine behind all of it is a name you've heard on every ski-town barstool since Labor Day.

El Niño is officially back, the tropical Pacific is warming up, and the almanac figures it gets strong before it's done. Warm water out in that ocean shoves the jet stream around, and the jet stream is the thing that decides whether a storm parks over the Mesa or slides right past us to somebody else's mountains.

Strong El Niño winters usually lean milder and wetter out West, which tracks with the map. So does the fine print, which tosses in a fading solar cycle and a couple of slow-moving ocean patterns for good measure. Nobody's betting the whole season on one number.

Where The Colorado Winter Forecasts Flat Out Disagree

Here's the wrinkle worth your time.

The almanac says above-normal snow for Colorado. NOAA, which runs actual supercomputers instead of a 200-year-old formula, dropped us into "equal chance" territory. No wet signal, no dry signal. A shrug in map form.

So the folksy book is more bullish on your ski season than the federal government is. Pick your fighter.

Read More: From Kebler Pass to Peak to Peak: The Best Autumn Foliage Drives Across Colorado

Should You Believe Any Of It

Same answer I gave you in July, because nothing has changed.

The almanacs love to brag about 80-percent accuracy. The people who study this for a living put it a lot closer to a coin flip, and "warmer, wetter, snowy at times" describes roughly every Colorado winter ever recorded.

I still read it anyway. There's something I like about an old book making a call in September while the rest of us refresh the radar all winter long. Tradition is allowed to be fun even when it's guessing.

Just don't buy the bigger snowblower on almanac word alone. Watch what El Niño really does, keep half an eye on the folks who forecast our mountains for a living, and we'll see whose map was right come April.