By Patric Hedlund
It came at us with as much advance publicity as a big budget Hollywood blockbuster. Everyplace you looked last week, the airwaves and internet were buzzing with the National Weather Service’s early notice of a major storm from the northwest, to bring 60 miles per hour winds and possible snow down to 4,000 feet. It was exciting, for this very warm and dry year, to anticipate real weather.
On Thursday, like watching the previews before the main feature begins, we were visited by the mystery storm—a warm sleuth storm, a stalker that arrived invisibly and left patches of damp, like crossword puzzle black squares next to patches of dry. How did it happen? We don’t know.
On Friday a more conventional bank of precipitation headed our way. I watched it—as likely did many of you—rolling in long sweeps across the horizon, gulping up the hills. They vanished behind low rolling banks of fog.
Watching from our wide mountain windows, I wrote a friend, "We are at sea now, pounded by winds in our tight little craft, riding atop a 6,000 foot wave. Hopefully some of the sea will soak into these parched hills. What fun."
I was still skeptical about snow flurries, but the watch continued. On Friday night the predicted winds came on stage like Marley’s Ghost, just around midnight. It seized our house and gave it three teeth-rattling shakes, like a lioness killing prey. Then…suddenly… it was still…and the wind passed on.
On Saturday, Dec. 8 we were treated to one of those polite little snows that blows fluffy powder around the hillsides in dry puffs that seem manufactured by Hallmark especially for photo ops and the gleeful launching of new sleds and mittens.
The Grapevine was closed for six hours on Saturday night at 9:02 p.m. CHP announced they were escorting traffic across the pass at 4:04 a.m. Then ‘The Great Storm of 2007’ was officially over by 6:26 a.m. when the Interstate 5 was fully reopened.
Let’s see what 2008 may bring.
This is part of the December 14, 2007 online edition of The Mountain Enterprise.
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