K-Squared Ramblings

San Gabriel Snow Panorama

We went to The District on Saturday afternoon to catch Cloverfield and check out the Auld Dubliner. I took the Warner exit to go in the back way, and noticed someone standing out on the shoulder of the ramp, taking photos. I looked out past the wide expanse of empty fields and was astonished to see the entire San Gabriel mountain range covered with snow!

Not just the tops of the mountains on the eastern half of the range, but everything, even the lower parts you can just barely see by the Cajon pass, and this huge expanse north of Los Angeles that I’m not sure I’ve ever seen covered.

I pulled over as soon as I found a spot I considered safe, then walked back up to the top of the ramp. I talked briefly with the man I’d seen taking photos, and he said he’d lived in the area for 50 years and had never seen the mountains like this. He also mentioned he had a friend who had served at the base*, and he was going to send him the pictures.

I ended up taking a 12-photo panorama (zoomed) spanning at least 120° from the blimp hangar on the left, across the San Gabriels, past the hills above Orange and Tustin, the foothills of the Santa Ana Mountains, on to Saddleback, which had a few bits of snow clinging to the mountainside.

Click to view panorama (424 KB 6648×500 JPEG)

*This is the location of the former MCAS Tustin. The Marine base was closed in the mid-1990s, and the land is only just starting to be developed—notably The District in one corner, which is what brought us to the area yesterday.

Green and Brown

While driving to work this morning, I looked off to the left and saw this beautiful view of fluffy white clouds hugging the mountains, and bright sunlight on the patchy green hills.* When I got into work, I went straight for the corner conference room that has a view in that direction… but the clouds had rolled in and turned everything gray. I kept checking back every so often, but the closest I got was this:

It’s been great to have a more normal amount of rain this year. The coastal hills all turned green after the second rainstorm, early in December. The hills up by the mountains took longer, since most of the area had burned off in the Santiago fire. Faint patches of green started to appear around Christmas, and now, the lower hills at least are more green than brown.

The scenery still looks odd, though. There’s a third peak (Flores?) near Saddleback, about 1,000 feet lower, that normally blends in with the mountain behind it. Well, the entire north face of the hillside burned. Then high winds blew the ashes away. People coated it with a green-gray material that I suspect was intended to prevent mudslides (it looked like the stuff they spray on dirt embankments in construction projects before the landscaping kicks in). It rained, repeatedly. Then we had high winds again, clearing all the gunk out of the air…and now it’s got the light brown color normally seen on the lower, closer hills during the dry season, instead of the darker brown of the mountains. It doesn’t blend at all, even from as far away as Tustin.

This was taken from in front of the Ralphs on Jamboree on January 13. You can see the line of hills in front is still a green/brown mix, and then there’s this light brown lump rising up behind them. On the left side you can see some remnants of the anti-erosion substance.

The following day, on my way to lunch at the Irvine Spectrum (7 miles away, and perhaps a 30-degree difference in angle), I went over a bridge and saw Saddleback next to the Ferris wheel. I knew I had to get that shot.

I parked in the west parking structure, then went running around the top floor looking for a spot where I could frame the wheel and the mountains together, and avoid too many light poles, and get above the few cars, and not have to worry that losing my balance would cause me to fall 3 stories to my death. I finally climbed onto one of the support pillars for the light poles in the middle of the deck, where if I fell I’d only fall a few feet.

Here, you can really see the difference between the areas that burned and those that didn’t. Compare this to the third picture in Saddleback Snow, or the second in Ashen Mountains.

Sadly, the best places to take photos from seem to be the middles of freeway bridges and tops of private buildings — in other words, inaccessible.

Saddleback Snow: Don’t Blink

There was a little snow on Mt. Saddleback on Sunday, but not much worth mentioning. Sometime early Tuesday morning, though, a freak storm seems to have hit the mountain… and only the mountain. We certainly didn’t get any rain down here in the flatlands.

At 8:20, the mountains were still shrouded in clouds:

By 9:00, the clouds were starting to burn off, leaving behind a coat of snow, not just on Santiago and Modjeska peaks (still behind clouds), but on the lower peaks to the northwest.

By noon, most of the snow had melted. There’s still some in the shadowed crevices.

Yes, Snow!

After the last few days of rain, today was clear and windy. I finally dragged myself out to a vantage point where I could see something of the mountains… just at sunset. This is looking northeast toward the San Gabriel Mountains from the edge of a vacant lot on the former MCAS Tustin. (You can see one of the two blimp hangars at the right.)

Update: Monday morning I went back to the same spot before work and took some photos in daylight. Katie said it looked like someone had sifted powdered sugar over the mountains.

Back to Sunday evening, I crossed the street and got some more pictures without the fence and saplings in the foreground, and stayed out until the light had faded. The view was clear all the way west along the range to Mt. Wilson. I also looked back toward the sunset, which lit up the edges of a cloud with a red-gold glow.

Snow!

Okay, so it’s ~40 miles away (and likely to stay that far, barring a freak storm or new ice age), and it’s not much (compare this April 2006 view)…and I half-suspect it’s all melted by now (this photo was taken Monday morning, and it looked lighter by Tuesday), but still…

Say, all those places that are getting flooded—we’d be happy to take some of that extra water off your hands.

Cloud Window

This morning I looked north and saw a narrow band of mountains sandwiched between two layers of clouds. The first place I could stop to take a photo, the lower layer was mostly blocked by hills, but you can still see it.

Click to enlarge

As a bonus, this turned out to be nearly the same shot as one of the photos I posted under Snowblogging four weeks ago (reposted here):

Click to enlarge

The lighting isn’t as good in today’s photo, since it was overcast, but you can really see the effect several weeks of one-day-a-week rain have had on the hills. They’ve gone from brown with splashes of green to green with splashes of brown!

Moon over Saddleback

I took this photo a few weeks back after a rainstorm dusted the local mountains with snow.

This is the same view as the third picture in this snowblogging post, taken at sunset that evening with a nearly-full moon. I decided not to include it in that post, but couldn’t bring myself to toss the cropped photo.

Snowblogging

Click to enlarge

We don’t get snow here in the middle of Orange County (heck, this is the first time I’ve seen hail here in at least a decade), but we do get to see it from a distance. Mostly off in the San Gabriel Mountains to the north and northeast. While stopped at an intersection this morning, I caught a glimpse of the snow-covered range rising out of the clouds in the distance. Unfortunately this is the best shot I could manage on short notice:

Click to enlarge

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Hidden Mountain

There was one morning in Hawai‘i that the clouds in Kona cleared and we could actually see something of Hualalai, the volcano that makes up the western side of the island and on whose slopes we were staying. Here’s the view from our hotel room balcony.

Usually it looked more like this:

Note: Our stay in Kona was April 4-10, 2005

Snow-capped mountains of L.A.

As long as I’m debunking myths about Southern California, check out this picture of the Los Angeles skyline:

Granted, I doubt it looks like this very often (the mountains only get snow in winter, and you can only see them like this on a clear day). Source: public domain photo on Wikipedia.

Update: I see this post is getting a lot of attention with the recent snowstorms. I’ve posted a panorama photo of almost the entire mountain range from January 2008.