The December 1913 Snowstorm: What the Weather Record Shows for Pueblo
Pueblo logged 12.5 inches of snow on December 4, 1913, a date record that still stood on the National Weather Service tables as of October 17. The newspaper side of the story is harder to find.
According to the National Weather Service's Pueblo extremes table for December, 12.5 inches of snow fell on December 4, 1913, along with 0.84 inches of precipitation. Both are still the listed records for that date.
The same office's record-snowfall page ranks that day seventh among Pueblo's biggest one-day snowfalls. Records there begin September 1, 1888.
Where 12.5 inches ranks
Four days sit above it, according to the Weather Service list: 16.0 inches on November 14, 1985; 14.0 on November 3, 1946; 12.8 on April 29, 1990; and 12.6 on April 2, 1957. Two October days, in 1972 and 1991, also rank above it, but the page gives no amounts for them.
The same page ranks December 1913 as Pueblo's second-snowiest December, at 18.2 inches. Only December 2011, at 18.6 inches, was higher. Taken at face value, the single day of December 4 would account for roughly two-thirds of the month's total. The tables do not break out the other days of the month.
The extremes table also shows that no other December 1 to 5 snowfall record comes from 1913. The records for those dates are from 1933, 1921, 2005 and 1960, and December 4 stands alone.
That record page carries a footer saying its day counts run through April 30, 2022. The pages were checked on October 17, 2026.
The wider storm
The text of the National Weather Service Boulder office's retrospective on the storm does not mention Pueblo. It centers on the Front Range. That document lists Denver's five-day total for December 1 to 5 at 45.7 inches, the largest in its Denver top-10 table, which covers 1880 to 2021.
It says temperatures held near 32°F through much of the storm, which it calls very unusual for December. That helped make the snow heavy and wet. It quotes a Denver Weather Bureau record of December 4: “The snow was very wet and heavy and by noon traffic was considerably impeded.”
Another passage quotes the Weather Bureau saying the traffic blockade “extended to the railroads,” and that some flat-roofed buildings collapsed. Those lines come from Denver's record. They do not say where the roofs were.
The Boulder document also says Denver's tramway service was cancelled at noon on December 4 and not restored for a week. It says the tramway hired 780 men on Thursday and more than 4,000 by Friday. The Denver Public Library says Denver's cleanup began December 1 and lasted a full month.
What we don’t know yet
The Ledger did not find an opened source describing what the storm did in Pueblo. That includes the Pueblo railroads, streetcars, schools, mills or roofs. Searches of newspaper archives at the Library of Congress and Colorado Historic Newspapers were blocked from this computer, so the 1913 papers were not read.
A secondary article that mentions Pueblo photographs of the storm could not be opened, so it is not used here. Nothing in the sources listed below establishes a Pueblo road closure, rail delay or building damage.
Records worth seeking include the December 4 to 8, 1913 issues of Pueblo’s daily newspapers, the original Pueblo cooperative weather observation sheets, and any photographs held by local archives.