10 Jan Bowman County and the sur­rounding region got its first big snowstorm of 2025 Saturday.

January storm brings winter chill, snow

Bowman County and the sur­rounding region got its first big snowstorm of 2025 Saturday.

While some areas in the county got just a trace of snow in the final days of December and the first three days of 2025, most of Saturday was just a long slow snowstorm passing through.

According to meteorologist Nathan Heinert of the National Weather Service Bismarck of­fice the storm was coming from the Rocky Mountains in Wyo­ming and Colorado.

Saturday’s temperatures remained in the single digits while slowly dropping between three to five inches of snow. With about a wind of 10 miles per hour, that meant the partic­ipants in Rhame’s annual Denis Luebke Memorial Coyote Hunt were facing 25 hours of extreme weather, starting Friday night.

When the competition closed Saturday night, it was minus 20 degrees with wind chill outside in Rhame.

According to Heinert, the ex­tremely cold weather was sup­posed to change Wednesday up to the low 30 degrees by Friday.

On Saturday, Heinert said the region was getting snow and had wind gusts of up to 20 miles per hour.

“You guys are just getting the northeast edge, with a lot of it falling in southeast Montana, eastern Wyoming and western South Dakota,” he said Satur­day evening. The Bismarck of­fice had issued a winter weath­er advisory earlier Saturday afternoon with snow predicted to get as high as about five inches in some areas. The ad­visory covered the counties of Slope, Hettinger, Grant, Bow­man, Adams and Sioux. It also advised there would be hazard­ous road conditions with some areas having reduced visibility because of the blowing snow.

“You could have more events like this throughout the win­ter. But the cold, by the middle of the week we are looking at warmer temperatures starting to move in again. That does not mean that it is going to stay warm for the rest of the win­ter,” he added.

The cold weather advisories Saturday cover most of the state, along with northern Min­nesota. “We did replace the wind chill warnings with cold weather advisories and warn­ings.”

He did say that when the warmer weather arrives in Bowman County around Wednesday that it would not last too long. “Then it will start trending more average.

“Through the middle of the month, we are not looking at any other major cold snaps. We probably will see some chances for snow here and there, but nothing major.,” he said.

“We will remain below freezing, more than likely (in the Bowman area),” Heinert said.

“As far as moisture goes this one (Saturday) is fairly lim­ited. Even looking at the next couple of weeks, they are not looking like wet, heavy snow that the farmers like to see. They are going to be more of these Clipper systems that kind of hit and miss…. But nothing like the ones com­ing from the south that have really good moisture. Typi­cally, those wont occur until the spring, like in March and April. Hopefully, we will get more moisture (in western North Dakota) as we get into those months.”