It was odd in mid February to hear the weatherman on the local television say something like, “is this the last blast of winter for the season?”
I do not know if he was trying to be funny, but a lot of people who have lived here in the Smokies a long time must have been scratching their heads, wondering if they had heard him right.
This beautiful region, full of peaks and valleys, has seen plenty of snow and awful storms in the waning days of winter and the early days of spring.
The Park Service says “changes occur rapidly” when it comes to spring weather in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park. “Sunny skies can yield to snow flurries in a few hours. March is the month with the most radical changes; snow can fall at any time during the month, particularly in the higher elevations.”
And it isn’t just in the elevations of the park. Anyone who remembers 1987 can tell you so.
April that year didn’t come in with showers to spur the May flowers—it came to the entire region with what might have been a once-in-a-lifetime blizzard that dropped heavy snow from deep in Alabama and all along the Appalachians.
Similarly, the National Weather Service says what it calls the Superstorm of 1993 was “one of the most intense mid-latitude cyclones ever observed over the Eastern United States.”
The Weather Service has a webpage about that storm. “Widespread heavy snow and blizzard conditions developed from Alabama and Georgia into the western Carolinas and Virginia. All-time records for snowfall were set in locations from Birmingham and Chattanooga to Asheville, then spreading north through the central Appalachians. By early afternoon on March 13, the central pressure of the low was lower than had been observed with any historic winter storm or hurricane across the interior Southeastern United States.”
Ellijay, Georgia, got 17 inches of snow out of that one. Chattanooga had 20 inches. The snow measured on Mt. LeConte was 60 inches.
All in mid-March, when most of us are still poring over seed catalogues.
Gatlinburg saw 16 inches of snow in that storm, tying the record from March 3, 1942.
The Weather Service also has some notes about the April storm of 1987.
“A prolonged and very heavy late season snowstorm caused extensive problems over southeast Kentucky and much of the central and southern Appalachians from late on April 2 through April 5. The storm system buried most of southeast Kentucky under one to three feet of snow, with drifts up to 10 feet reported in Letcher County.”
Six inches of snow fell as far south as Birmingham, Alabama, in that lovely winter blast. J.B. Elliott, who worked at the National Weather Service in Alabama back then, blogged a few years ago about it. “In the Great Smoky Mountain Park, 60 inches accumulated on Newfound Gap. That is the largest single storm snowfall in North Carolina history—at least up until that time. As much as 36 inches was recorded in southeast Kentucky. In Charleston, West Virginia, 25 inches easily broke the previous record for the entire month of April, which was only six inches. Akron, Ohio, got 21 inches—an all-time record. Interstate 40 was closed by the snow for the first time since it had opened to traffic 20 years earlier.”
Snow is not unknown here even in the month of May.
In 2017, the park saw a serious snow storm in the first week of May, with six inches reported at Mt. LeConte.
In May 1992, a freak storm dropped nearly five feet of snow on Mt. Pisgah, located on the Blue Ridge Parkway between Hendersonville, North Carolina, and Waynesville.
Locals in Haywood County, North Carolina, say they’ve seen snow in the month of June.
So sometimes you must take what the weatherman says with a grain of salt. Don’t fret if you see spring snow. Don’t plant the tomatoes too early, either.
—Jonathan Austin