Steamboat Springs and the Snowy Range: Where the Powder Came From

Steamboat Springs sits at the western edge of Routt National Forest in northwestern Colorado, at the foot of the Park Range where Mount Werner rises to ten thousand five hundred sixty-eight feet. The mountain is named for a local boy, Buddy Werner, who was the first American to win a major European alpine ski race, in nineteen fifty-nine at the Hahnenkamm in Kitzbuhel. He died in an avalanche in Switzerland in nineteen sixty-four.

The snow at Steamboat is a particular kind of snow. The moisture comes from the Pacific, rises over the Sierra Nevada and the Wasatch, loses most of its water content in those crossings, and arrives over the Park Range as a light, dry, low-density snowflake. Locals and marketers call it Champagne Powder, a phrase the resort trademarked. The trademark is contested but the meteorology is not: the powder skiing at Steamboat is genuinely different from the denser snow at resorts closer to moisture sources.

To the east, the Medicine Bow Mountains and the Snowy Range in the combined Routt and Medicine Bow National Forests span the Wyoming border, reaching roughly twelve thousand feet at Medicine Bow Peak. The road across the Snowy Range, Wyoming Highway One Thirty, provides a summer-only crossing at ten thousand eight hundred forty-seven feet that is among the most accessible alpine drives in the region.

Both forests were combined administratively with the Thunder Basin National Grassland under a single supervisor, a management pairing that runs from the alpine snowfields above Steamboat to the shortgrass prairie of eastern Wyoming.