Donna Reiner, a local historian and a good friend of Get Your PHX, has written many articles over the years for the Arizona Republic and others about Phoenix history and memorials. This month, she tells us about the few times that it snowed in Phoenix, as the city first began to grow.
We use her services when we list properties of historic significance to help us tell the stories behind the homes.
We are happy that Donna is allowing us to re-publish some of her articles on a monthly basis. If you or your business ever needs a historian, let Donna know at laydeescholar “at” hotmail.com.
Let it snow, let it snow. Yes, it’s winter and in true Phoenix fashion, we wait for the snow…..to fall and pile up in the mountains. Many of us like to play in it and others want it to snow for its benefits to the watershed.
After recently spending ten days in Winnipeg, Manitoba, the geographic center of North America, I became acquainted with huge mounds of snow, grey days, and very, very cold temperatures. For this Phoenician, snow is best in the mountains so one can ski or sled. Fortunately, it infrequently happens here.
Picture this at noon, November 19, 1919. You are downtown and walk outside. You see strange flakes falling from the sky and they are not soot. Our local weatherman attested that snow fell in Phoenix that day and time. Yes, in November at noon and a whole .1 inch! Ok, it was not normal. In fact, that was the earliest it had snowed in Phoenix since the US Weather Station had been established here. (It had snowed .2 inches in March 1917, but it melted far too quickly to be any fun.)
It snowed or flurried, enough to count, again the following year, but nothing significant until January 1933. Drumroll….it actually snowed for nearly two hours on the evening of January 20th and the weather bureau reported 1 inch. Too bad the temperature rose and the precipitation turned to rain and destroyed the snow.
Four years later almost to the day, it snowed again in Phoenix. But this time during the day and that 1 inch of white fluffy stuff stuck for several hours so children and adults had fun making snowmen and having snowball fights. Great fun for all the desert dwellers who were not used to such weather. If you lived further out from town, you might have experienced up to four inches.
And looking back over the past 82 years, those two instances, 1933 and 1937, have been Phoenix’s heaviest recorded snowfall. A half-inch or less or flurries, while recorded by the weather bureau, are not much to brag about to friends and relatives.
If it snows now at the end of January (not necessarily within our city limits or where it can be officially recorded), there is a clear reason as explained by my son. “Mom, it’s the Waste Management (Phoenix) Open.”
