Average snowfall for boise (home, maintenance, prices)

[Torrie]

I know this question comes up quite a bit, especially with new posters. Thought this article would be of interest.

Which winter month does Boise get its highest average snowfall? | News Updates | Idaho Statesman

[DESERTRYDER]

Here's my choice, a little bit of snow falling in Boise or stay here and dodge falling bullets
The only thing falling in Calif is IQ's and home prices.
We'll take Idaho..

[pll]

The snow isn't bad here at all. If you like to ski or snowboard you'll love the winters in Boise.

[DRobnett]

Hi Torrie,

The snow information isn't hard to locate on typical ID gov. sites but the real question is how are the roads maintained? We just had record snows here in western WA and the city was nearly shut down. We didn't have garbage service for three weeks. I assume since this is a regular occurance there the cities/counties allocate a decent amount for street maintenance, is this the case?

[Torrie]

Compared to your neck of the woods-significantly better! LOL!

I spent Christmas in Seattle- so I understand what you were dealing with.....snow plows seemed non-existent while we were there. I can't ever remember seeing so much snow in that area. The only snow plows I saw were on the airport runway, but that was it.

In Boise, they keep up on the main roads using sand and magnesium chloride(de-icer), which seems like it isn't allowed where you're at. Depending on how bad the storm is, they may or may not get to the side streets, but eventually some of them do get scraped. Typically the snow doesn't stick around all that long so you can get out and about with minimal delay. Sometimes we'll get a storm that comes with arctic air, and when that's the case, the snow doesn't melt as fast, but I wouldn't consider that a normal weather pattern for our area, just an occasional occurrence.

[DRobnett]

Well I'm glad you got to experience a little bit of our craziness so you could speak to it. I'm also glad to hear it's much better managed over there. I don't mind the snow but when you have to jeopardize your life and your finances just to get to work...it's a little ridiculous. But hey...we aren't affecting the earth over here, we're au naturale .

[Torrie]

Ya, when we flew into Seattle on the 24th, the roads were horrific. Our flight was real early in the morning, good, thing, otherwise I don't think we would have made it. There was so much water, snow, & slush on the roads it made for treacherous driving conditions. I will say...one disadvantage to magnesium chloride is it can be washed away with rain making it useless....Could be it doesn't offer the same results in Seattle as what we get over here. You guys seemed to have a lot of fluctuations between freezing temperatures and above freezing temperatures along with a lot of rain with the snow, which would have made the product useless. Actually with that storm the same happened to us, here in Boise. Usually we don't get so much rain mixed in with the snow, but that storm we did. Everyone was complaining that the ACHD wasn't doing a good enough job. What had happened was they laid the product down, but rain came in between the snow washing away all the product, like they had never done anything, and they had to start all over again.

[DRobnett]

I was wondering how that storm affected Boise. I'm not sure what they use here for a de-icer but it isn't put down with sand and they use it very sparingly (usually on the freeway entrances/exits). It's sticky and probably resists the water a little better. WA typically doesn't get that much snow and I've never seen it hang around that long. The poor snow plows (the few that we have) were working 24/7 to keep up. Oh well, let's just hope we're done with that fun for the rest of the season. I'm ready for some longer days and daffodils .