In Mammoth Lakes, preparing for a mammoth storm
It was a postcard-perfect kind of day in Mammoth Lakes on Friday: The sky was clear. The sun shone brightly. And the snow-covered mountains beckoned to the skiers who have flocked here in recent days.
“It’s a bluebird pow day, people!” the Mammoth Mountain resort tweeted, saying in gleeful skier lingo that it was gorgeous out on the mounds of fresh powder.
But it truly was the calm before the powerful, wet storm that’s on tap for Northern California this weekend.
The epic system — known as an atmospheric river — could dump so much rain and snow that some ski runs and roads will be declared off-limits, with forecasters warning of significant flooding, mudslides and avalanches in the Sierra Nevada.
Up to 12 inches of rain is expected to fall on areas below 8,500 feet beginning Saturday morning, and up to 7 feet of snow could bury higher elevations, according to the
This weekend’s system could bring 36 straight hours of heavy rain from Mammoth Mountain to Susanville, in Lassen County. While that is good news for California, which is entering its sixth year of drought, the coming rain could melt already-standing snow — feeding watersheds swollen from storms earlier this week, forecasters said.
“It’s going to be a busy weekend,” said Edan Weishahn, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in Reno, sighing.
On Friday, with the wintry blast on its way, a nervous energy gripped Mammoth Lakes.
Plows scraped icy roadways. Excavators hummed as they cleared huge piles of snow. Cars sat abandoned on roadsides and at gas stations, covered with thick blankets of snow from the recent wallopings.
“If the storm comes in as wet as they’re talking about, it’ll make for a big mess, with some really heavy snow,” Terry Lucian, the manager of Kittredge Sports, said as he scraped icy snow off the entrance to the ski shop’s A-frame building.
The storms that brought several feet of snow this week had helped boost business, as visitors flocked to Mammoth to ski and snowboard on fresh powder, Lucian said. But he worried some traveling to the area this weekend could be in for disappointment if the storm gets so bad that parts of Mammoth Mountain are shut down.
“Everybody wants the snow; they just don’t want it while they’re here,” the 39-year Mammoth resident said.
Also known as a “Pineapple Express,” an atmospheric river is a long band of warm, tropical air moving in from the Pacific. Such systems can carry as much water as 15 Mississippi Rivers, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
In Mammoth Lakes, locals agreed that the coming storm might not be the best for skiing, because much of its precipitation is expected to fall as rain at all but the highest elevations.
Weekend snow levels in the Sierra Nevada are expected to fluctuate from between 7,000 and 8,000 feet early Saturday to as high as 10,000 feet on Sunday, the National Weather Service said.
“I cannot recall a season that had so much lower elevation rain like we are having,” weather blogger Steve Taylor wrote Friday on MammothSnowman.com.
Flooding is a major concern in Northern California and western Nevada, as the Carson, Truckee and Susan rivers all are expected to become overwhelmed; flash flood warnings have been issued throughout the region, forecasters said.
In
With roads shored up and lessons learned from the 1997 Merced River flooding — which closed the park for two months — officials announced Friday that the popular Yosemite Valley would be off-limits as a precaution this weekend.
The portion of the Merced River that flows through Yosemite, which usually has a depth of a few feet, was forecast to rise above flood stage — 10 feet — by early Saturday at Pohono Bridge, said Christine Riley, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service. It is expected to peak at 16.2 feet on Sunday, she said.
The last time the river reached flood stage in that area was in 2011.
“There are quite a few issues that are going to come from all this rain,” Riley said. “December was a really wet month for the Sierra Nevada, so already the ground is really saturated. Any additional rain is going to create problems.”
Riley said forecasters were particularly concerned about mudslides and flooding in recent wildfire burn areas, including those left by the Erskine fire in Kern County last summer and the 2015 Rough fire in Fresno County.
In the eastern Sierra Nevada on Friday, highway maintenance crews were taking advantage of the clear conditions to prepare for the deluge.
“We have snowplows out, we’re running graders, snowblowers, monitoring the roads and sanding the roads,” said Florene Trainor, a California Department of Transportation spokeswoman based in Bishop.
Caltrans has been using explosive devices to clear snow from key corridors at risk for avalanches — including near Lee Vining in Mono County and on State Route 158 near June Lake, Trainor said.
After the weekend system, another rain-making storm is expected to hit Northern California on Tuesday.
“We’re kind of advertising ‘unsettled weather’ next week, because we’re so focused on this storm,” Riley said. “We’re hitting this one hard.”
Sgt. Todd Hammitt of the El Dorado County Sheriff’s Office said officials on both sides of the California-Nevada border met Friday morning with the National Weather Service to prepare for the expected onslaught.
“Any time it’s Mother Nature, you have to be ready,” he said.
Two sinkholes emerged on El Dorado County roads on Thursday, and residents already have filled 12,000 sandbags in preparation for the storm, Hammitt said. Another 20,000 sandbags were on the way Friday.
“People are definitely in a state of panic right now,” he said. “We’re getting a lot of calls asking if we’re going to be able to deal with everything. It’s the general pandemonium of not knowing what’s coming.”
Twitter: @tonybarboza
Twitter: @haileybranson
Twitter: @josephserna
Barboza reported from Mammoth Lakes and Branson-Potts and Serna from Los Angeles.
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