1871 snowstorm buried county; El Nino means few flakes this year

What a difference 143 years make. On this date in 1871, it started to snow.

For three weeks, it snowed and snowed, blanketing the ground through the end of that year.

The blizzard that hit Washington Territory on Dec. 17, 1871, came 18 years before statehood but a decade after the territorial Legislature created Snohomish County. It happened 30 years before The Everett Daily Herald began publishing in 1901. There is a record of it, though.

An essay about the 1871 snowstorm, by Greg Lange, was published in 1999 by HistoryLink.org, an online encyclopedia of Washington history. It cites Puget Sound Dispatch and The Weekly Intelligencer, a precursor to The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

During that three-week period starting 143 years ago today, there were at least three “disagreeable visitations” of snowfall, The Weekly Intelligencer reported. Here’s a tidbit from Lange’s essay: “By December 28, 1871, the Snohomish River freezes, and steamships are blocked from the river.”

Imagine that — and you’ll have to, I found no pictures. I did find photos from the big snow of 1916. That January, a Herald photographer captured scenes of downtown Everett where snow piles topped the heights of people on the street.

“Snohomish County: An Illustrated History,” a 2005 book by David Cameron, Charles LeWarne, M. Allan May, Jack O’Donnell and Lawrence O’Donnell, has a section on the snow that began Jan. 31, 1916, and continued for three days.

“Officially more than 30 inches fell in Everett in one 36-hour period,” the book says. “Snow depth was reported to be 42 inches in Snohomish and 48 inches in Marysville.” In 1916, it was the Stillaguamish River that froze.

By Feb. 2, 1916, 23 Shetland ponies were killed when heavy snow caused a barn to collapse in Everett, according to HistoryLink. In Seattle that day, snow destroyed the dome of St. James Cathedral.

This week, it’s a far different — and warmer — story. The Northwest Avalanche Center reported, in an Associated Press article Monday, that snow totals are way below normal. The ski area at Mount Baker, with just 6 inches of snow, had only 9 percent of its normal mid-December amount. Oh, but winter doesn’t arrive until Sunday. There’s still time, skiers.

Kirby Cook, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Seattle, reminded me not to have high hopes for a white Christmas in Everett. We’re in an El Nino year, Cook said Tuesday. Although we’re in the heart of what he calls our “cold air season,” El Nino is unlikely to bring us historic blizzards this winter.

Explaining the phenomenon, Cook said that ocean waters normally warmer in the western Pacific toward Australia are, during an El Nino pattern, warmer in the eastern Pacific near South America. That changes the jet stream north of the equator. “Here in the Pacific Northwest it tends to be a little warmer and drier than normal,” he said.

El Nino can also mean the wet winter weather we’re used to hits California instead.

Cook had no easily retrievable information about the 1871 blizzards. For rivers to freeze, “it would have to be cold a very long period of time,” he said.

And for that to happen — or for a long stretch of extreme summer heat — there must be an easterly flow. “In Western Washington, it’s really hard for us to be cold a long time, or hot for a long time. Usually after a day or two, we return to our normal on-shore westerly flow of warmer air from the Pacific,” Cook said.

He also said that even as we see signs of climate change and global warming, there can be lots of variability. That includes harsh winters in many places. “It’s a very complex system,” Cook said.

I was in Spokane over Thanksgiving weekend and drove my sons past the pond at Manito Park. They hardly believe stories I share from my childhood, which sound like Christmas-card fantasies. I really did walk a mile from home on many winter afternoons to skate on that frozen pond.

Those were the 1960s, not the 1870s. There’s no going back in time, so maybe I’ll head east this winter.

Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460; jmuhlstein@heraldnet.com.