Portland has seen its lowest snowfall this winter in more than a decade

Yahoo

30-01-2025

Jan. 30—Holly McKibben has been commuting about 60 miles from Portland to Bethel this year for her favorite winter pastime, cross-country skiing.
The 67-year-old lives just a few minutes from the Riverside Golf Course, a popular skiing spot in the Riverton neighborhood, but she has only been to the course a handful of times this season. There's been so little snow in Portland, she said, that commuting to ski at the Inland Woods and Trails in Bethel has been a better option.
"It's sad, you know, you grow up in Maine, you like sports, you're counting on snow," said McKibben.
On Thursday afternoon she was finally gearing up to ski at the golf course after a few inches of snow fell earlier in the week. But even that has done little to help the city's snowfall totals recover. Data from the National Weather Service in Gray shows that less snow has fallen in Portland between Oct. 1 and Jan. 30 this year than any other winter in the past decade.
Meteorologist Jerry Combs said only 16.6 inches of snow have fallen in Portland since Oct. 1. During the same time frame in 2015, the center recorded 53.3 inches of snowfall.
It's part of a larger trend toward less snow in the city, he said.
McKibben remembers growing up in Portland in the 1970s and regularly seeing her dad's 1972 Chevy Impala buried in snow. But she says she's come to terms with the fact that those days are over.
"It's the wave of the future, we've got climate change and things are not going to go back to the 1970s," she said.
Snow for Portlanders has long been an important conduit for activities like skiing and sledding, that make the long winters fun.
Michael Collin, 51, coaches the Portland middle school Nordic programs. He said it's been a challenge to train this season with so little snow. He has been relying on the team's roller skis and occasionally ice skating to keep the team in shape.
The students have been traveling to Fryeburg, where there is more snow, for races the last few weekends, he said.
"We've had noticeably less snowfall this year and we've gotten pretty much all of it in the past week," he said.
Mia Frye, 34, recently moved to the city from California. She said she was counting on skiing as a way to stay active during the winter.
"It's a major bummer because skiing is such a nice way to get out during the winter and I definitely feel pent up if I don't get out there," said Frye.
The National Weather Service is predicting 2 to 3 more inches of snow may fall on Friday evening followed by a couple of more inches on Sunday afternoon. Combs said this pattern of a few inches of snow falling every few days is likely to continue over the next week or so, but he said there are no major storms on the horizon.
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