‘A phenomenal amount.’ Sierra Nevada communities cope with mountains of snow
Branden Silva trundled through the luminous snow in his Caterpillar skid steer loader to carve a path to his neighbor’s front door, cigarettes at the ready.
A county plow had — luckily — hit their Twin Bridges street promptly this time, almost tunneling through the powder. Though Silva lives just off Highway 50, which the state clears promptly, the county often takes a few days to get to the side streets.
That Monday, thanks to the quirk of the plow schedule, getting in and out of the homes on Tamarack Pines Road was now just a matter of clearing out the driveways and doors. Silva, smoking in the vehicle as flurries occasionally came down, was matter-of-fact in the face of severe weather.
“It’s a phenomenal amount of snow,” Silva said with a shrug, and he knows his snow. He lives in the sprawling family cabin in Twin Bridges seasonally, working the graveyard shift at the Sierra-at-Tahoe ski resort just down the highway, dealing with winter precipitation.
At night, he keeps the resort’s parking lots clear; sometimes, he grooms the slopes. At the resort, he said, workers had piled the snow just about as high as they could on the side of the parking lots that week, and they would have to move the piles to make room for more.
During the day, he uses his own equipment to clear the snow from his looping neighborhood.
Silva’s county, El Dorado, as well as Placer and Nevada counties, declared local states of emergency March 2 and 3. As of Wednesday afternoon, the UC Berkeley Central Sierra Snow Lab had measured 6 feet of snowfall at Donner Pass over the past week; between Feb. 21 and March 8, storms had unleashed nearly 18 feet. Last week, an atmospheric river pummeled California again.
As Silva said, it’s abnormal for this time of year.
In Nevada County, which was included in Gov. Gavin Newsom’s March 1 state of emergency declaration, thousands of people lost power, including nearly 2,000 customers around Nevada City who were off the grid for more than a week. With snowpack in the Sierra at over 200% of its average for early March, Californians in mountain towns near Lake Tahoe were by turns frightened and sanguine.
Because in this part of the state, coping with extreme weather events intensified by climate change has become routine. During the Caldor Fire that ripped through 222,000 acres in the Sierra Nevada mountains in the late summer and early fall of 2021, Silva and another neighbor rigged up pumps and ran hoses up from the south fork of the American River, which runs just behind their road. The two men drenched the houses on the street and, they said, kept the fire at bay.
A year and a half later, thousands of charred pine trees still bristled, inky black against the white slopes.
Drought improves as extremes persist
This year’s winter storms have alleviated the worst parts of the state’s years-long drought, though it’s not yet over. These wild swings are expected, experts explain, but are also clearly worsening in the midst of a climate breakdown brought on by carbon emissions.
“The climate that California has, it’s a climate of extremes — wet and dry,” said Jay Lund, vice director of UC Davis’ Center for Watershed Sciences. “And it’s probably going to become wetter and drier in the future, even if the average stays the same.”
Still, facing a budget shortfall, Gov. Newsom submitted a budget proposal in January that cut $6 billion from the state’s plan to address the climate emergency.
California families are among those dealing with the climate emergency fallout.
Sylvia Kline lives along the Interstate 80 corridor near Alta in Placer County with her husband and their 4-year-old child. The town sits at just over 3,743 feet elevation.
Currently, Kline is over 37 weeks’ pregnant. Because of a medical condition, she’s planning a C-section, and the nearest hospital is over 20 miles away. “This,” she said, “has kind of been a stressful situation.”
Kline’s family lives just under a mile down a private road — the county doesn’t maintain it. Traversing that private road during the thickest stretch of snow in late February took her and her husband about four hours, she said, as they shoveled and winched their way along.
In the week of Feb. 26, she did plan for what would happen if she went into labor: Ideally, she and her husband would be able to make it out in their trusty Jeep, but failing that, she’d just have to call 911.
After she and her neighbors hired a plow, her mind was put somewhat at ease.
Conditions had improved, only for more snow to fall last week.
Even with relatively good fortune in the form of minimal power outages and a home with a steep metal roof that sloughs off the snow well, Kline said she is worried about herself and her neighbors. She noted that many of the people who live nearby are elderly.
Although Kline’s pregnancy makes the risk of getting stranded more obvious, unexpected health incidents can turn into terrifying emergencies when you can’t seek medical attention. Seniors and people with disabilities are at the greatest risk during storms and heat waves.
Kline was especially concerned about the warmer storm moving in, which was expected to create a risk of flooding.
Kline said, “I don’t know how much better that’s gonna be.”
Snow days and mild malaise
In contrast with panic-inducing wildfires, the snow tended to slow the pace of life. School was canceled in El Dorado County on Monday, and Elijah Hammer was home, in Meyers, about five miles south of Lake Tahoe. He was thinking about all the baseball practice he was missing. The season just started, and his first game was supposed to be Friday. It was canceled.
He can’t practice in the batting cage in his backyard, because only the very tip of it is poking out of the snow.
Before that game, Hammer — a sophomore catcher who just made the varsity team — will be responsible for strapping on a harness and shoveling snow off the roof of his home.
“I’m the roof-shoveling guy,” he said.
Hammer explained that he straps crampons to his shoes for better grip on the top of the house and breaks out the roof rake so that ice wouldn’t build up on the side of the roof, trapping snowmelt and rain on the shingles.
“An ice dam,” said Erin Kelly, who lives in the home, too.
Kelly had popped up to the house from her job as a therapist in South Lake Tahoe because multiple clients had canceled their appointments. After the previous snowstorm in February, Kelly looked outside at one point and saw Hammer, on snow piled so high that the teen was level with their second-story window.
“It’s been a lot, and we’re supposed to have a warm storm coming in,” Kelly said, referring to the atmospheric river system in the forecast, that hit Thursday. “So that’s gonna be really bad.”
She had been putting on skis to stomp down snow piles so they would be short enough that the arc of snow from their blower could clear the top. They have had to use a jackhammer to break ice on their property.
The snow and ice didn’t stop Kelly from grilling chicken wings for dinner last Sunday, however.
Down the road, Erica Travillion was waiting out another snow day with her three kids. Rylan, 10, pushed the family snow blower to clear out the car. They needed the car free because Travillion and the children were going to pick up lunch for their dad, who was stuck at work. Travillion lived in South Lake Tahoe for 20 years, and only moved to the Meyers house last year.
“Big difference, from living in town and living out here,” she said. In Meyers, she said, there’s “way more snow.”
Though some buildings in the town of South Lake Tahoe sported icicles tall enough to play in the NBA, Meyers does get more snow. They’re at a higher elevation than South Lake Tahoe; Meyers is about 3 miles as the crow flies from Echo Summit, the highest point on Highway 50.
The Travillions’ yard backs up to the forest, so if they get really trapped by a storm, Erica Travillion said, they take their sleds out back for entertainment. When the power goes out, they’re stocked up on board games and candles. They still get a little cabin fever, she said.
Crunching through feet of snow on a little pier over Lake Tahoe with his enormous dog, Lobo, Robert Crossgrove observed that California needed all this water. But then again, he said, the water had a dark side: Come summertime, the wildly growing things would just become more fuel for wildfire.
It was hard to picture fire in the snow, under skies turned pearly gray. But the burned up pine trees were a jagged reminder.
This story was originally published March 12, 2023 at 5:00 AM.
