Winter Storm #2

I am totally digging this Winter weather. We've got a storm coming in off the coast, up from Eureka. It's dumping lots of rain on the way here, and its reasonably warm out too. We're expecting a couple inches from this storm.

I got up pretty early today in the dimness of dawn to a grey sky and strong winter blustering about. But it was not cold. I gathered brilliant yellow fig leaves from the lawn, bagged them up, and scuttled back indoors before the few drops became many. Right now there's an infrequent misting, visibly distracting over distance but barely wetting anything but decking and pavement, both of which were water saturated by the prior winter storms. Still no snow here yet, and this one is just more rain as well. In the scale of things, rain is perfectly normal. Paint Your Wagon takes place in Nevada City, which is about 4 miles from where I'm sitting.

Yes, that is Clint Eastwood. And he sings. Its a musical. They have songs about Gold, Rain, and Talking to Trees. The local theater in Nevada City does it every couple years for the tourists and local fans. The movie itself was filmed up in Oregon since Nevada City kept developing so its not tents and mud anymore. There are MANY other abandoned ghost towns lurking in the West, if you care to tour them. Bring a GPS, which helps with locating them. Some remnants are just foundations and a few bits of broken glass. Some aren't even that. Some are more intact, with abandoned frame houses and other buildings left behind, like Bodie, which became a state park.

Up here, everybody measures everybody else's hardships and excuses and foolhardiness by asking what elevation they live at. Not where in particular, but the elevation. For You Lowlanders, this may sound Mysterious! but its a good measure of how much snow you deal with, and snow is such a pain in the buttocks that its the primary shared hardship of the region. Snow melts into black ice overnight, or evaporates in strong wind. It piles up into drifts and it tears branches off of trees, downing power lines and leaving you in the dark. It turns into dirty ice and requires installing tire chains where its melting and soaks into your clothes and requires careful effort to avoid, to drive through places where it isn't melting but getting deeper the higher you climb. And chains break, tearing apart your car, maybe causing an accident. It's EXPENSIVE to live above the snow line. The higher up you live, the more of this crap you get to deal with, the more headaches and expense.

I live just below (2600 feet) the nominal snow line (3000 feet). We get a week of snow on the ground and a few days of it being a road hazard. That's a big part of why people live here, still, after the mines shut down. They'll reopen eventually because there's still billions of dollars in gold down beneath my feet, somewhere. We do get blackouts here, but they usually involve a drunk driver smacking into a power pole, not snowy covered branches. In the countryside its all too common so owning a generator and battery powered lanterns is a good idea. Sometimes blackouts can go on for weeks. Did you know they don't build power station transformers in the USA anymore? That should be a strategic asset, mandatory, with stockpiles and everything, like military supplies of nerve gas or Velveeta govt cheese. Locals here keep stocked pantries in case they get snowed in, and many people have wells. Most of the people living at this elevation or higher have a Subaru. I wouldn't mind having one myself. It only gains you a little more stability and a little earlier or later driving in crappy conditions compared to a standard front wheel drive car, but that little bit can make the difference and people own them here for good reason. In these times, with this fun weather to enjoy, doing things for GOOD reasons is key.