Although it has been quite a bit cooler lately, July and August 2025, were hot and (mostly) dry, and several degrees warmer than the long-term average. We had a temperature of 89⁰ on Aug. 22 and I was flooded with requests (two or three) as to whether this is a record.
The short answer is no, the current official record for hottest day in Gunnison history is 98 degrees set on Aug. 15 and 25,1931. Some reports show a temperature of 105 degrees on Aug. 5, 1894, but the state climatologist has recently expunged that temperature as being unreliable. Here’s the long answer to the question of how hot it gets in Gunnison:
Just for fun, I decided to plot how often it has reached 90 degrees in Gunnison since 1900. Yes, there are weather records dating back to 1893, but they are incomplete and, as noted above, some are considered unreliable. Not surprisingly, the bulk of the 90-degree readings are in the 1930s.
For you young people, those are the infamous “Dust Bowl” years, which were notoriously hot, dry and very windy throughout the Great Plains, and seem to have even affected us up in the mountains as well.
There were six days of 90 degrees or above in the summer of 1931, but that is not the record. That belongs to the summer of 1936, which shows 13 days in the 90s. No other year comes close to 1936, except, surprisingly, the summer of 1990, which had eight days of 90-degree weather, including six days in a row in late June and July. That seems to be the record for consecutive days of 90-degree temperatures.
The warm spell of the 1930s dwindled down in the 1940s and into the 1950s. The exception is the outlier summer of 1954 that had eight days of 90-degree temperatures — with 95 degrees on June 23,1954. This is somewhat odd, since the mid-1950s were notable for some of the heaviest snow falls in our history. For example, we had 101.3 inches in the winter of 1955-56, and 98.1 inches in 1956-57. Our long-term average is about 50 inches, but it’s been about 40 inches in the last 30 years. The town of Crested Butte shows a similar pattern with a couple of years with 300+ inches of snow in the 1950s, compared to their long-term average of about 200 inches of snowfall.
There are some other interesting patterns in the data worth your attention. For example, going backwards in time, although we had two 90-degree days in 2021, there is a gap of 5 years before we find another in 2016, and then a gap of 11 years until we find another in 2005. The biggest hiatus in our history is a 15-year gap between 1976 and 1961 with zero 90-degree days in between.
We’re certainly not constantly sweltering in the heat! Overall, I counted about 104 days of 90-degree weather in the last 125 years, meaning there is less than a 1% chance we’ll have a 90-degree day in any given year. In 2024, Grand Junction had 94 days of 90-degree temperatures, and Montrose experienced 90-degree weather 59 days in 2023, 60 days in
2022 and 78 days 2018. There are no gaps in their records.
Need I remind you that Phoenix recently hit its 100th straight day of at least 100 degrees? ‘Tis a joy to be in Gunnison — and winters are getting warmer, despite that stinker of a January we had this year.
(Bruce Bartleson is a retired emeritus professor of geology at Western Colorado University. He spends most of his time now watching the weather.)
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