Snow cover insulates soil-dwelling organisms from both warm and cold air temperature extremes, altering cold stress and energy use over winter. As climate change alters both snow cover and air temperatures, it is critical that we account for the role of snow in modulating winter stresses on soil-dwelling organisms. The importance of snow will change along environmental gradients; along ascending elevational gradients, air temperatures decrease while snow cover extent and duration increase. We explore how snow modulates cold and energy stress on a montane beetle, Chrysomela aeneicollis, along replicated mountain transects in the Sierra Nevada Mountains in the Western United States. Ecophysiological models, driven by long-term microclimate data in five replicated elevational transects, showed that energy use decreases as elevation increases, and that this effect is more pronounced in snowy winters. Mid-elevation habitats are the coldest, and that this effect is amplified in dry winters. This suggests that decreased winter snow cover will lessen the energetic cost of dormancy in low elevation habitats, while intermediate elevation habitats will be most negatively impacted by declining snowpack due to increased cold exposure. High elevation habitats have relatively stable conditions regardless of the amount of winter snow cover and may be able to provide refugia as drier winters become more common.