The day began with rain, and with rain it ends. A sort of anemic late-season storm arrived before dawn and then parked. Even a weak little storm will get you wet when it decides not to move on. I can hear rain on the roof and running down the drainpipes. At the other end of the house, I can hear the TV weather guy talking about the rain continuing. I’m thankful for a dry space to sit and listen.
Winter While We’re Not Looking
It’s raining tonight here in Berkeley. It rained a liittle here on Friday, too, and some more a few days before that. Except for the fact the rain has only added up to a large thimbleful so far, it’s almost like a real winter has snuck in to Northern California. A couple more little storms might shuffle through this week, but the forecasters seem to be competing with each other to display the most pronounced lack of enthusiasm about the prospects for any appreciable rain falling. One can understand why they’re a little out of sorts. February is a time when storms have made history in California, when meteorology is a matter of life and death. This year, the weather scientists here are keeping their eyes peeled for computer models that might portend a tenth of an inch of rain.
But we had a beautiful day waiting for this evening’s rain to move in. Low cumulus type clouds beating their way to the east and in the spaces between them you could see high clouds and condensation trails. Kate, Thom and I went to Wheeler Hall at UC Berkeley to see storyteller/country picker David Holt. Afterward, we drove down to Oakland’s Pill Hill neighborhood for lunch (non-East Bay types: Pill Hill is the site of hospitals and medical centers, thus the name). On the way down Telegraph I looked up through the roof window and thought it would make a swell cellphone camera shot. So that’s where that picture up there came from. (It was processed in an iPhone app called Instagram, so the contrast is much higher than the original scene, which was shot in color). I did not even notice the bird when I shot the picture, and even if I had I could never have placed it so nicely at the convergence of those two contrails on the right. (No Photoshopping here–unlike this guy.)
And the picture below is from yesterday. I wrote a little something last week about the profusion of blossoms in these parts, winter or no winter. Here’s more evidence:
On Tenaya Lake
The vanity never stops. This is me out on Tenaya Lake in Yosemite the week before last. My nephew Max snapped the picture and titled it “The Ice Whisperer.” What I was after was the sound–a lot like the sound of whale calls–emanating from the lake as the ice expanded and reacted to the strollers and skaters on the surface. You can get a vague idea of the sound, in between passages of me crunching around on the ice, from the audio clip below. Note: I was the only one in shorts out there, prompting one person to say, “I hate you. But thank you, because I think that’s going to make it snow.” The lake is under a couple of feet of snow right now after a series of storms that started last Thursday.
High Country, Out of Character
That’s Mount Dana, elevation 13,057 feet above sea level, just south of Tioga Pass in Yosemite National Park. The picture was shot from a ridge above the Gaylor Lakes just north of the pass, elevation about 10,500.
My nephew Max and I drove across the Tioga road on Wednesday, and it’s a trip that will leave an impression for some time. As I’ve said elsewhere, this is country that’s normally far beyond the reach of the casual winter traveler. The Sierra this high up is usually buried in snow. Beyond that, it can be cold and harsh in a way that’s utterly foreign to us Northern California lowlanders. The day we were up there, it felt like the temperature was in the high 40s, at least, and warmer in the sunlight. There was no wind. I was wearing shorts, though that was pushing it a little. Plenty of others have journeyed up to this strangely accessible alpine world. A local outdoors writer did a blog post last week about a couple guys who had driven up to hike Mount Dana–yeah, that peak pictured above–in running shoes.
All the weather forecasts show that this midwinter idyll, made possible by a long, long dry spell accompanied by unusually mild daytime temperatures, is coming to an end. The forecast for the end of the week is blizzardy: snow, then more snow, with high winds. And already, the weather has changed. Today’s high is for a high of about 30, with 50 mph winds gusting to 80 mph. Tonight’s forecast: a low of 10, with a westerly wind of 60-65 mph gusting to 105 mph. I have a picture in my head of being blown clear off this ridge.
More on this later. For a rather short trip–we were only on the road across the high country for a few hours–it filled my head with impressions.
A Midwesterner Visits: Yosemite
We’ve been giving my nephew Max, a University of Iowa freshman who until this week had never been west of Des Moines, a crash winter tour of our slice of central/northern California. (A little bit of deja vu here: He’s making his first trip west about a month before his 19th birthday; I was about two and a half months shy of 19 when I made my first visit out here in 1973, starting out on a Chicago-to-Oakland ride on Amtrak).
What’s the one place you’d take a new visitor to this part of the state (I mean after you got done with Fisherman’s Wharf)? For me, it’s Yosemite, a part of the state I have visited only infrequently but which I think leaves an unforgettable impression. Also, I confess I wanted to get up there because of the historically dry weather we’re having–so little snow so far that the Tioga Pass road, which rises to nearly 10,000 feet, is still open (more on that later).
As always happens with me and my trips, we were a little on the late side getting out the door on Tuesday. But we had plenty of light, and stopped frequently along the way to check out the sights and take pictures. We checked in to our little cabin just outside the park entrance, then headed for Yosemite Valley, a little more than 25 miles away (the reasonably priced lodging down there was all booked, and I didn’t see springing for the Ahwahnee Hotel for one night). We got down to the valley floor just as the sun was crawling up the granite faces hanging above–notably El Capitan and in the distance, Half Dome. We parked near a bridge over the very serene-looking Merced River and snapped away as the sun faded and night came on. Then, finally feeling the cold (I was wearing shorts, of course), we went to dinner and headed back to our cabin.
Another One of Those Days
Another one of those days, meaning: clear, warm, bright, and dry. How dry? So dry that today there’s a red flag warning for high fire danger in parts of the Sierra Nevada because of high winds and low humidity and the utter lack of snow. I’ve been in California for 35 years, and that’s the first time I can remember this happening.
Down here in Berkeley, fall color continues and, on a breezy Saturday morning, leaves that ordinarily would have been brought down by storms a little earlier in the season are still falling.
Balmy New Year, with Crow
Crow on a wire, just around the corner and up the street from us. This particular specimen was one of a pair that was taking a dim view of The Dog’s passing as we headed out on a walk late in the afternoon. And the afternoon: Clear and warm as any New Year’s Day has a right to be. The very unofficial high at our house was 68.5 degrees; the Berkeley record going back to about 1900 is 67, set in 1996 (the National Weather Service reports that at least one East Bay high temperature record was set today: it was 67 in downtown Oakland, breaking the record of 66 set in 1997).
Rain, If You Look Hard Enough
There it is, that drop of water right there at the end of that little clear holiday lightbulb–evidence of our big New Year’s Weekend rainstorm. Somewhere far to the north, it’s really been coming down the last couple of days. A favorite weather-table wet spot, Red Mound in the southern Oregon Coast Range, has probably picked up half a foot of rain or more. Here, we’re measuring the wet in hundredths of an inch: .01 in San Francisco, .05 on the top of Mount Diablo. Up in the middle of Mendocino County, Boonville got a real soaking: .11. At the north end of the Napa Valley, Mount St. Helena got .16–a full sixth of an inch. And so ends one of the dryest Decembers since the new arrivals in the area started measuring such things a bit more than a century and a half ago.
After this torrent blows through, the next chance that rain will fall within 100 miles of us here in Berkeley is about the middle of next week; and right now, it looks like it might not be much closer than 100 miles.
Mission Peak Walk
[Update: Here’s the route for the hike.]
A holiday week outing, down to Fremont, then up Mission Peak. With our trademarked late start, we left home just about 2 p.m. and were on the trail just before 3. A surprise: There was a pretty good crowd setting off the fairly steep fire-road trail toward the peak. The climb is about 2,140 feet, in about 3 miles, from the Stanford Avenue parking lot. The peak elevation is given as 2,517 feet, just a little under the top of Mount Tamalpais (which was visible far to the north above a smoggy-looking haze). I’m used to having trails in our more northerly reaches of the East Bay pretty much to ourselves; meaning sure, you see other walkers, but generally they’re some space between groups. One exception to that: Nimitz Way in Tilden Park, above Berkeley, which has a large parking lot that generally seems mobbed on the weekends (the main reason, along with the asphalt paving, I haven’t walked out there in years). But I think the crowds are drawn to the Nimitz Trail because it’s easy, whereas the Fremont Peak walk involves a pretty decent grade most of the way (for my knees, easier up than down).
The day was warm and the light was gorgeous all the way up. The mountain gets rockier and more “alpine”-feeling the higher you go. We got to the top just after sunset, and I had the thought as several groups passed us on the way down that maybe we’d be the last ones up there for the day. We hung out for a few minutes, took some pictures, at sandwiches that Kate had made, gave the dog some water, broke out a headlight to negotiate the rocky parts of the trail in the dusk, then started down. And here came another surprise: hikers, alone and in small groups, climbing up the trail in the dark. We stopped one group of three to ask whether this was a local custom. It is. Since the park is open until 10 p.m., this is a popular destination at night; and that’s a big difference from the Berkeley Hills, where the parks seem to clear out completely at dusk even though they’re technically still open as late as the ones further south.
The picture above: Looking west from Mission Peak across southern San Francisco Bay. The light really was that good, only better.
Weathermen of Yesteryear
I grew up in Chicago, meaning I grew up on Chicago TV. In our house, the local news was a staple, and I’m inclined to believe it wasn’t bad though maybe it was also not as good as I sometimes tell myself it was. Anchor and reporter names I recall include Floyd Kalber, Frank Reynolds, Fahey Flynn, Bill Kurtis, Jane Pauley, Barbara Simpson, and Walter Jacobsen. Some of them went on to work with the national networks, for what that’s worth.
And then there were the weathermen. (Yes, they were all guys.) I think of them not because they were great, although I again lean toward the view they weren’t bad. I suppose there’s a book or at least a long essay on how we have come to see and think of the weather in the electronic meda age compared to earlier eras going back to the time when we guessed at the day’s conditions by looking to the horizon and sniffing the wind.
For better and worse, here are the weathermen who delivered the forecasts to my impressionable young mind:
P.J. Hoff, who cartooned the weather on the CBS affiliate, WBBM, Channel 2. He had a character named Mr. Yellencuss that I imagine he’d draw when bad weather was in the offing.
Harry Volkman, who worked on several Chicago channels and seemed to pride himself on (and was given credit for) the “professionalism” of his forecasting (he’s the first TV weather guy I recall displaying a seal from the American Meteorological Society during his broadcasts).
John Coleman, part of the first “happy-talk” Chicago news team on Channel 7, WBKB (later, WLS). In my book, his claim to fame, which was a pretty good one, was to forecast Chicago’s January 1967 blizzard (while he was doing weather on Milwaukee TV). According to his own account (in the comments to a post about Chicago’s Groundhog’s Eve Blizzard of 2011), Channel 7 hired him immediately after the storm, and I kind of remember him on Channel 7 by the time another storm hit two weeks or so after the first one). He went on to national TV and was a cofounder of The Weather Channel. And today, bless him, he’s a loud voice in contesting the case for climate change.
There were others, but they’ve faded from memory if in fact they ever made much of an impression. I ought to mention Tom Skilling as a great Chicago weather guy–the greatest, for my money–but he is very much of the present era.