Snowfall and Trail Traffic

While we’re deep in the throes of winter here in the Wood River Valley, that doesn’t mean we aren’t thinking about the next summer trail season! As we start to plan our trail counter schedule for 2023, we thought it might be interesting to see if and how snowfall in the winter season might affect overall trail use. 

The amount of snow that accumulates in the winter can impact when trails “melt out” - and become accessible to you! This influences when we place trail counters at certain locations and begin to collect trail monitoring data. 

This is what we’ve found:

(Data courtesy of onthesnow.com)

While the 2021-2022 winter season experienced more days of snow events than 2020-2021 overall, total snowfall accumulations were reported to be the same for the two seasons. 

Now take a look at the average daily trail traffic rates for our trail counter on Old Adams Road: 

Between the 2021 and 2022 summer trail seasons, average daily trail traffic dropped for Old Adams Road. This drop could be for a variety of reasons, snow accumulation and melt-out dates being one of them! 

It’s only mid-January, and with this winter’s snowfall accumulations steadily creeping towards last year’s season total accumulation, we ask you: do you think the rockstar winter we’ve had so far will affect summer trail use levels? Will average daily trail traffic decrease with a snowier winter? Or will summer 2023 trail stoke overshadow the lingering whispers of winter this spring, with higher average daily traffic than 2022? (Avoiding wet trails and muddy sections until they are ready for travel, of course). 

Let us know in the comments!