Vintage Seattle contributor Colin
Holloway sent in these vintage 1980′s snapshots showing a snow-blanketed Seattle. They were found in a box with dates that ranged from 1985-1986 — perhaps a reader can pinpoint this one.
Thanks a bunch, Colin.
Click for the high res.
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| Seattle snowstorm, 1985-1986. Photo courtesy Colin Holloway. |
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| Seattle snowstorm, 1985-1986. Photo courtesy Colin Holloway. |
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| Seattle snowstorm, 1985-1986. Photo courtesy Colin Holloway. |
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| Seattle snowstorm, 1985-1986. Photo courtesy Colin Holloway. |
They’re all from around Sixth and Seneca. The first one is looking east. The second is a little further west and facing west, with the Olympic Hotel left of center. I believe the third is looking across I-5, with 1st Presbyterian Church behind the pole, and the last one is facing north, with the Sheraton off in the distance.
I remember this snowfall. A friend of mine had just moved out here from Chicago, and I was extolling Seattle’s virtues, including the fact that snow storms were much rarer here than back where he came from. A few days later, this happened, blowing my street cred all to smithereens.
Snowstorm?
I would have described those scenes as having “a dusting of snow”.
In Seattle this is a snowstorm, hell, it’s a blizzard.
There was snow in November 1985 that stayed on the ground for about a week or so if I remember correctly. I think we also had some snow in December or January, though, so it’s hard to date this exactly.
That November snow was far deeper than seen here. I remember working at a shop on Queen Anne Hill and businesses were shutting down by mid-afternoon. I took a chance and rode my Honda 90 bike home to Eastlake with both feet on the ground serving as “sled” rails as I didn’t want to leave it at work just in case the snow stuck around. Which it did.
The Friday before Thanksgiving of 1985, I awoke in Montlake to 8″ of snow. It was 14 degrees at kickoff of the Apple Cup the following Saturday, & my Australian date was less than comfortable, until the antifreeze kicked in.
The memories! I recall both those years as a kid. Now if someone would post some pictures of the nasty wind and snow storm of Dec 1990.
That was an exceptionally “slick” snowstorm, as I recall. I took a Metro bus downtown that was supposed to get off the freeway at Union and could not, continued on to the Columbia exit and ended up sliding sideways into a guard rail over around Yesler someplace. We poor passengers had to pick our way down the steep hill to 5th Avenue and slip and slide back north to wherever we were going.
Yeah, if this is the November snow, it’s from when it was melting away a week or so later. There was a lot more snow than this when it first fell. It’s pretty clearly slushy and melting here.
I remember the night of that snow, walking out to I-5 and 50th (I lived near 50th and Roosevelt at the time), and standing on the freeway overpass looking at a completely EMPTY I-5, covered in snow. Distantly, the sign over the freeway bridge was flashing “ICE ON BRIDGE… ICE ON BRIDGE”. But there were no cars.
I’m pretty sure we had snow later in the winter, though, so this picture might be from later.
Thanks!
That snow storm, a week or so prior to Thanksgiving 1985, was the first time they had closed the UW in I-don’t-remember-how-many years.
I remember that storm well too, because that was right after I’d moved to Seattle to attend the UW. Woke up Friday morning to ~ a foot of snow on the ground. The 45th St. viaduct was already closed, after an early-morning bus tried to go down, and wound up sledding down at an angle. By 10AM, the viaduct was a sled run for the students who lived near there.
Pretty much the whole region shut down. SPU was still open, but I can’t recall any other schools west of the Cascades that opened that day. I remember hearing on the radio that the city manager had asked for an emergency salt budget appropriation from the city council – he’d spent the annual budget that morning trying to get people to work, and everyone wanted to go home, too.
By the end of the weekend, things were more-or-less back to normal, but as I recall we got another 3-4 inches the day before Thanksgiving as well – just to make sure that nobody forgot, I guess.