Yosemite snow totals smash 54-year-old record

SFGate ^ | March 1, 2023 | Eric Brooks

[KC Burke]

I do enjoy being isolated in a beautiful spot with monster snow. The best adventure like that I had was at Tahoe on Valentines weekend about twelve years back. There was good snow at Tahoe. I had my wife fly out to meet me in Sacramento and we took off with a 4Runner into a snow storm. It took us five hours to get to our B & B and it was buried in snow. What a winter wonderland that week end was. It snowed again in three days just before we left and we, again, fought heavy snow to return to Sacramento.

[ridesthemiles]

The Pacific Crest Trail will take a beating with the snow melt.

[Regulator]

That brings up a pet peeve of mine.

CALTRANS does a terrible job of keeping I-80 open.

It is the Regulator opinion that it's because the employees are all from LA, and have no clue about how to control snow.

Utah by contrast does a FAR better job:

The difference is that they get out and start plowing IMMEDIATELY when it starts snowing. By contrast, CALTRANS blocks off a section of the freeway and lets the snow accumulate before plowing. I have had them explain to me that they want the plows to have something to plow.

That's nuts. It means by the time they get the snow off, it's turned into a black ice skating rink. AND they create a 25 mile long jam at Applegate or Kingvale.

There's no reason that I-80 up to Truckee can't stay clear virtually always. But of course, they're from California, so they know everything, right?

[ProtectOurFreedom]

“according to VDH California is not closing the gates on their reservoirs”

I’ve heard VDH say that in his podcasts. Water management is tough — they need to have enough reservoir capacity for the upcoming huge snow melt runoff. With 30 to 40 feet of snow in the Sierras, there is going to be a lot of snow melt this year.

I don’t know what is true. Is it good water management / risk management practice? Or are they intentionally prolonging the perceived “drought” by sending all that water to the ocean?

I drove by Lake Shasta three weeks ago and I was shocked to see how low the lake still is. The water management people really should do some PR work and explain what they are doing.

[Vaduz]

Climate change huh Moe.

[ckilmer]

yeah but it should be the case that the water people know how many inches of snow in the mountains translates into how many feet of lake level rise.

So they would know how much they have banked for later and therefor how much they can let out now.

Another two weeks of this kind of precipitation and the lakes behind the dams will all be full—and that’s before the spring melt

[Chickensoup]

they plan to starve us

[KC Burke]

Part of the management problem is that the capacity is so negligible because they have built so few reservoirs in the last fifty years. Environmental concerns, earthquake limitations and the like have let environmentalists and government egg heads kill California domestic water and agriculture water. Without capacity you have to manage for the worst case annually and the rest of the year you do stupid stuff.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

You’d think this would be basic hydrology and statistics. They do regular snowpack measurements and know exactly how much water is in that snowpack.

I’d like to think they are competent and are keeping the reservoirs half-full or less to handle the snowmelt, but VDH thinks something sinister is going on.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

“they plan to starve us”

There is lots of evidence of that plan all over the place — energy prices, shutting down farms in Netherlands, Ireland and Canada because of nitrogen (which is suddenly a new problem), talk about bugs, etc.

[DoughtyOne]

Paging Greta Snagglepuss…

[ckilmer]

I don’t know about sinister.

The only thing that I heard was that delta smelt/salmon crowd wanted more water released to suppor the fish and that the governor was dragging his feet about allowing more outflows.

The big problems is that its tough to predict future weather—beyond a couple days to a week.

I just did a query on chatgpt about expected snowfall for march. the answer was that they currently expect below average snow fall.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Hanson said that artificial water shortages they are inducing right now will cause less water to flow to farms and orchards in the Central Valley and all the nearby valleys. That will cause farmers to fail, land to be taken out of production, shortages, and crop prices to go way up. The Central / San Joaquin Valley, the Salinas Valley, and Pajaro Valley produce a significant fraction of the nation’s food. Add in the Coachella Valley, the Imperial Valley, Napa Valley, the Sacramento Valley and another dozen ag valleys and you have a HUGE amount of food supply.

“Sinister” means the feds are intentionally curtailing ag water to intentionally curtail food production. That is VDH’s contention.

[markman46]

more then likely when then snow melts, and that is done not by the state but by the feds dept of reclamation.

[markman46]

not to mention all they use is sand, no salt or brine to melt the ice.. the state of calif is nothing but nuts when it comes to snow removal.

[minnesota_bound]

I drove to Yellowstone the first week in October 1988 and spent part of the day there then continued on my trip. There was no snow. Sparse people including one dummy trying to take a photo of a bison up close while I stayed in my car.

After I got to Los Angeles I read in the paper that the park got 4 feet in one day where I had been the past week.
I could have ended up like the Donner dinner party.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

Friends of ours did a SnowCat tour of Yellowstone in winter a few years back. They came in through the north entrance and got to the Old Faithful Lodge. They absolutely loved it.

[Seruzawa]

Lake Powell is extremely low too. There simply hasnt been enough snowfall for years. That will change during the spring run off. Cali will still muck it up though.

[ProtectOurFreedom]

It took several years for Lakes Powell and Mead to fill after the dams were completed. But back then the population of the west was a fraction of what it is now, there wasn’t much agriculture or industry, and no golf courses. So I don’t know if we can ever get enough rain to fill them again given those water demands.

It would be informative to look at an analysis of inflows, outflows, and water demands the past 100 years.