I remember riding in a shuttle back from LAX once before dawn, and I could swear that I could see the silhouette of the San Jacinto Mountains from Los Angeles. They’re out near Palm Springs. Not exactly something you normally see from LA.

*There’s a wedge-shaped hill that’s visible in the west from north Orange County on really clear days. Somehow I had it in my head that it was Signal Hill, but I noticed when I went to Long Beach Comic Con a few weeks ago that (a) I passed the city of Signal Hill on the way to the con and (b) the hill I can see from Orange County was still visible to the northwest from Long Beach. Thanks to Google Earth for helping me figure out just what hill it actually was!

The wind’s changed, the weather’s cooled off, and firefighters are starting to get the Station Fire under control. For the first time in days, we’ve been able to see the San Gabriel Mountains.

The eastern part of the range was clearly visible this afternoon — more visible than it usually is during the summer, with LA’s famous smog. The middle was completely shrouded in smoke. Interestingly, while it looks like the plume is being blown east, visibility seems to be worse toward the western end. Maybe wind near the ground is blowing west, and wind higher up is blowing east?

Compare to this shot of the mountains covered in snow last December:

I’ve been to the observatory once, on a tour my family took on August 8, 1992. We’d just come back from a trip to Florida where we visited Disney World and Cape Canaveral during the summer I was 16. I really wish I could remember more about the trip…but I took pictures and labeled them (though not in much detail). With the observatory threatened, I thought I’d dig them out and scan them**. You can see all eight on my Mt. Wilson Observatory Tour 1992 photoset on Flickr.

The Observatory’s website is apparently hosted on the grounds, so the fact that its fire status page is still responding indicates it’s still there and has power. The latest update says that they’re setting up a backup info page at http://joy.chara.gsu.edu/CHARA/fire.php, but that’s showing a 404 error right now.

*As in the Hubble Space Telescope.

**Scanning them was not a problem. Digging them out? That was a problem. I knew exactly which photo album they were in, and thought I knew where the album was. As it turned out, it wasn’t there. It was in an unopened box shoved at the very back of the long,narrow hall closet, such that I had to move 3 other boxes, several bags, and an unused CD rack just to see that it was labeled “photo albums” on top. Edit: And, oh yeah, the trail of ants along the wall, going after the long-forgotten bag of Halloween candy. The wall I kept brushing up against. How did I forget that part?

That’s the missing piece that makes the classic phrase more than a simple tautology. It’s not just that it’s in the last place you look. It’s that it’s in the last place you want to look.

Saddleback Snow, originally uploaded by Kelson.

Not as spectacular as December’s display, but still nifty. The San Gabriel Mountains were really impressive this morning, but I didn’t have time to catch a picture.

Also: it’s way too cold for Southern California. The car thermometer said 45°F.

I’ve added a few more pictures to my Snowline photoset showing the unusual amount of snow in the local Santa Ana Mountains.

There’s a few more from Thursday, plus a couple of pictures I grabbed Friday morning, like the one shown above.

Update: Here’s one more, from a batch of photos I took at lunch today. More at Flickr…

Saddleback and the Santa Ana Mountains got an amazing amount of snow yesterday, and I went out to a couple of spots this morning to take photos. Check this Flickr set for more.

Amazingly, I got to see something similar again today. In a way, even better, because this time the sky was clear, providing better light and an unimpeded view.

After yesterday’s rain and a prediction of more showers today, I was surprised to see empty blue sky this morning. While driving over a bridge I looked out the window and saw the mountains just coated with snow. As soon as I dropped Katie off at her office, I made a beeline for that spot near The District in Tustin that (for now) offers an unimpeded view of the mountains that dominate the skyline (on clear days) of Los Angeles County.

By then a few clouds had begun to swirl around in the distance.

San Gabriel Snow (Section 1), originally uploaded by Kelson.

I couldn’t tell at the time whether Saddleback had any snow or not, since it was still backlit (this was around 8:20 or so in the morning), so I didn’t take any pictures of it.

Here’s a panorama of the mountain range. Click on the image below to see the full thing.

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.

UPDATE DECEMBER 18, 2008: This post is getting a lot of traffic today, but it’s from last winter. If you want to see photos from this week’s snow, check out Misty Mountains: Another San Gabriel Snow Panorama from the same spot on Tuesday, December 16, and my Snowline photoset on Flickr, for those pictures and several of Saddleback and the Santa Ana Mountains on Thursday, December 18, 2008.

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.

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.

UPDATE DECEMBER 19, 2008: This post is getting a lot of traffic today, but it’s from last winter. If you want to see photos from this week’s snow, check out my Snowline photoset on Flickr.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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

Once or twice each winter, a light dusting also falls on Mt. Saddleback. This winter’s second snow hit over the weekend. This next shot is taken just a few feet from the first one, looking east instead of north.

I had some much better views on my walk to lunch, but naturally, I forgot to bring my camera. So instead I’ll post a photo from the aftermath of another snowstorm, taken on November 22, 2004:

UPDATE FEBRUARY 10, 2009: This post is getting a lot of traffic today, but it’s from three years ago. If you want to see photos from this week’s snow (and some from last December), check out my Snowline photoset on Flickr.