JACKSON, Wyo. — Halloween wasn’t the only thing spooky about October. Temperatures were downright scary cold last month.
October 2019 will go down as the second coldest in Wyoming history. Ditto, Utah and Washington. Montana and Colorado were right up there as well. Idaho? Forget about it. Coldest October ever.
Pocatello shattered a record low in October, recording the first sub-zero temp in state history (-6 on October 30). It was -20 in Rawlins that same evening.
In Jackson, October began on the chilly side. On Oct. 2 the high was just 42. After flirting with a few days in the 60s during the middle of the month, highs plummeted to mostly the 20s and 30s for the final 10 days of the month, lows dropping into single digits above and below zero.
The biting cold that moved into the Mountain West at the end of October broke records was funneled from Canada into the western and central United States by a southward plunge of the jet stream. It helped many states set new records for lows in October.
Wyoming’s coldest October came in 1917.
