Spring? Not In Tahoe...

I had to make a trip to Folsom. What I noticed was glorious green grass.


I came back up the mountain to winter. The snow has sunk a bit so that it is only 5 feet deep on the deck that we're not shoveling. As I write this, it's 14 degrees in our part of the South Shore down below Echo Summit. Ain't no spring here.

If you've got spring in your part of the world, enjoy it!

Massive Snow To Palm Trees In 80 Minutes

Up on Echo and Donner summits, the current snow depth is around 15 feet (30 feet of snowfall compressed down over time). If you drive down the West Slope, you get to the Central Valley floor and its palm trees in about 80 minutes. That isn't unique in the world, but it is very rare.

Big Snow to Palm Trees in 80 Minutes

There are many places where you can drop lots of elevation in a relatively short drive. For example, you can go from over 10,000 feet on Maui to sea level in less distance. But there isn't huge snow up on the Haleakala summit.

There are likely places in the Andes and the Alps and the Himalayas where one can go from snow to palm trees in a relatively short distance. But most of those places don't get that much snow.

So the next time you make the drive, take a moment to marvel at the contrast between Tahoe snow and the warm palm-tree climate just down the mountain!

What Is The Definition Of A Brutal Winter?

Let's see... By the end of February, Squaw Valley had set a record for total snow by that date of 393 inches. That's 32 feet, and we still have March and April left to go.

Let's see... Snow sliding off our roof ripped off our wood stove chimney pipe. It was reinforced and tied to the roof with HEAVY angle bracing that I thought could probably support a car (if one were to set a car on the braces). The chimney pipe was also protected by a HEAVY metal ice cutter. Yet, we came home after a major storm and it all was gone.  Not just hanging there broken. Gone. As in not visible. As in buried somewhere down in the berm below the roof, a berm which, on the north side of the house, is above the second floor. True, we do live in a particularly snowy part of Tahoe. But still...
(You may think we had escaped to the tropics during that storm, enjoying tropic stuff - warm breezes, flowers. Unfortunately, we'd been staying at our studio because we couldn't get to our house for days. Yes, we live on a regular public road with regular public snow removal. But it took three days after the storm had passed for the rotary to come up our road. Until that time, the only way to travel over 6 feet of snow is by snowshoe. In years past, storms like that left us snowed-in, trapped in our house. This one left us snowed-OUT, trapped at work.

Let's see... Another definition of a brutal winter is when we finally get three days in a row of sweet, warm sunshine, we go manic, skiing, dancing on the deck, writing sonnets, drinking wine.

We're not pretending winter is over. After 29 years in Tahoe, we know the snow keeps falling until June 15th and sometime even later. But we're still manic.

Imagine Three Kinds Of Personal Transportation

Tahoe has a large assortment of water birds. I was looking at this guy the other day, and I thought, not only can he fly, he can walk, and his body is a boat. How privileged would we feel if we could do that?

This Water Is Clearer Than Tap Water

We walked out to Pope Beach in the snow. Saw my shadow in the water.

Wow. Not the shadow. The clear, clear liquid. Amazing.