There’s a good chance Colorado drivers traveling for Christmas will encounter slick roads this weekend, with snow forecasts ranging from a few inches along the Front Range to more than 18 inches in the southern mountains, according to the National Weather Service.

Colorado Department of Transportation road crews are expecting traffic levels similar to a normal winter weekend, said spokesperson Jared Fiel, and are planning to be out on the roads through Sunday.

“It’s looking like it’s going to be hitting the southern mountains a little bit more, and up around here it’s looking like a relatively normal winter storm – but we haven’t had a lot of those this year, so we will take whatever snow they can give us,” Fiel said.

There’s typically very little traffic on Christmas Day, Fiel said, and CDOT staggers crew schedules so that everyone has time at home with their family on the holiday.

A traffic forecast from the Interstate 70 Coalition advises drivers to expect congestion on westbound I-70 on Friday night and Saturday until noon, while eastbound travelers can expect heavy traffic in the afternoon and early evening on Saturday and Sunday.

The National Weather Service’s Boulder office issued a hazardous weather outlook for northeast and north central Colorado for a storm that’s expected to bring snow to the mountains and a mix of rain and snow to the plains by Saturday afternoon.

The amount of snow that will accumulate is still unclear, it should be enough to create slick driving conditions Saturday night through Monday, according to the agency.

A winter storm moving into western Colorado is expected to bring 4 to 8 inches of snow in the central and northern mountains and 8 to 16 inches in the southern mountains, according to the National Weather Service’s Grand Junction office. Eighteen inches of snow or more are possible on south-facing slopes in southern Colorado.

AAA is forecasting a record number of holiday travelers, said spokesperson Skyler McKinley, with 115.2 million expected to travel more than 50 miles from Saturday through Jan. 1. That’s the second-highest number of holiday travelers AAA has recorded, second only to 2019.

AAA expects to respond to 10,000 calls in Colorado over a 10-day holiday period, most of which are for dead batteries, flat tires and people locking their keys in their car, McKinley said.

“Those are often things you can look ahead and check on before you go,” he said.

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