The confluence of the East and West forks of the Carson River south of Genoa Lane on Tuesday morning.
Photo by Kurt Hildebrand.
If one year of average precipitation was out of the ordinary in 2024, it was doubly so in 2025.
“We just barely got to two normal years back to back which is really abnormal,” said Natural Resources Conservation Service Hydrologist Jeff Anderson.
Anderson said that the weather pattern this year where most of the wet weather came in the spring was also a feature in 2024, making up for an extremely dry January.
“The precipitation in the Sierra comes in big chunks,” he said. “This winter’s storms were warmer, and the snowpack didn’t have as much cold content. It never developed in the lower elevations.”
Anderson and Water Master Chad Blanchard measured the snow pack at Mount Rose, which is running very close in snow-water equivalent to Carson Pass at the top of the West Fork.
A site at Spratt Creek above Markleeville never reached 2 inches of snow during the season. Anderson said the site was burned over in the Tamarack Fire and that there’s still a lot of carbon on the ground.
The site hit its 36-year record of 25 inches on March 10, 2023.
Unlike snow pack, though the site received close to its median 19.3 inches of rain, watering a new crop of vegetation that might pose a fire danger.
Anderson and Carson-Truckee Federal Water Master Chad Blanchard conducted the last manual snowpack measurement of the season at Mount Rose on Monday.
Snow-water equivalent at Mount Rose and Carson Pass were both just a bit above 100 percent of median as of Monday morning. Carson Pass came in short of Sunday’s median peak. At the top of the West Fork of the Carson River, there was 28 inches of water locked up in the 63 inches of snow, according to Conservation Service telemetry.
The median peak at Ebbetts Pass isn’t until today. The 90 percent snow-water equivalent at the telemetry site is almost 7 inches short. According to telemetry, there were 28.3 inches of water locked up in 67 inches of snow at the top of the East Fork on Monday morning.
“The winter of 2025 hasn’t measured up to 2024 and is far short of the records set in 2023,” according to the April 1 Nevada Water Supply Outlook Report issued by the Conservation Service last week. “Despite that the eastern Sierra and Northern Nevada are still in good shape as we move into snowmelt season.”
April begins irrigation season and also marks the point when basin snowpacks hit their highest snow-water equivalent before the snow melt.
“This year snowmelt started early due to a week of warm temperatures between March 21-27,” according to the report. “Daily average air temperature at SNOTELs across the region peaked at 48 degrees on March 26, very close to a record for that date.”
Snow in the Eastern Sierra basins would have exceeded median peaks if melt in late March had not decreased snow water amounts prior to the end of March storms arriving, according to the report.
As of Monday morning, the Carson River Basin was at 107 percent and the Walker River Basin was at 101 percent.
The Carson Water Subconservancy District is taking guesses on what the annual peak flow will be at the Carson River gauge just north of the Douglas County line.
Anyone can participate by emailing kelly@cwsd.org their guess for the date and rate for the peak flow, along with their name and organization by 5 p.m. April 15.
Snowmelt from warm temperatures this week is forecast to swell the West Fork to 11.9 feet, within 7 inches of the action stage at Woodfords, by early Friday morning.