Snow in Las Vegas

Once every few years it snows in Las Vegas enough to accumulate. In early 2004, my husband woke me around 7:30 in the morning to alert me to this rare phenomenon. I took pictures quickly, because the snow was gone within a couple of hours.

It's much more usual to experience severe heat in Las Vegas, which causes things to melt.

Thumbnails lead to larger versions...

d	This is the view into our backyard, facing north.
d	The back corner palm covered in snow, as is the barbeque. The weight has bowed the branches down.
d	Close up of snow on a palm leaf.
d	Turning around to show most of the rest of the backyard.
d	My husband's footprint in the snow. This illustrates just how unusual snow is here: the grass underneath is still green and springy.
d	This is a lamp in our side yard. We keep it lit with low-energy fluoro bulbs every night to make the poorly-lit street outside safer for pedestrians. It would have still been lit as the snow fell, so you can see how cool the low-energy bulbs are; if they'd been incandescents, the snow would not have accumlated on the globes.
d	An off-season rose covered in snow. The rose was unscathed after the snow melted.
d	The pathetic little snowman I made using what had fallen on our patio table. It took about half a day to melt completely away.
d	Yup, there's the poor dude half-melted with his eyes and mouth sitting on the table beside him.
d	Looking at the houses across the street, you can see more palms weighed down by snow, and more terra-cotta roofs covered in a dusting of snow.
d	The view down our street of snow-dusted houses. Note that the pavement was too warm even in almost no sunlight to let snow accumulate.

In another rare incidence of below-zero temperatures in Las Vegas, one night it was cold enough that the water from the sprinkler system created an ice-rain effect:

d	Wide view of the frozen area of the backyard. Nothing else back there froze.
d	Close-up view including the sun shining through.

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Page last updated June 9, 2004.

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