SoCal Weather

Vaughn McMillan

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ABQ NM
Just so all you folks east of us out here on the left coast don't think we're getting preferential treatment in the recent weather patterns, here's what I saw on my way into the office this afternoon. This was taken about 200 yards north of my front door. I'd guess the snow line was about 500 to 800 feet above our house. We've gotten a bunch of rain, but if it get much colder we could end up with a bit of white stuff on the lawns. (We're in the foothills of the town of Tujunga, which is within the Los Angeles city limits.)

Tujunga Canyon Snow 800.jpg

It's by no means comparable to what a lot of you other folks have seen this winter, but it still doesn't match the mental picture most people have of sunny and warm Southern California. :rolleyes:
 
Vaughn,
preferential treatment? You deserve it for the risk of tremblors you're under.

I thought I was having a great day recently, I had sun albeit cold temps. I found a 'lead' and photographed this sign.

adp5als.jpg


While I was putting the info for this property and a couple of others nearby (taking perhaps ten minutes +/-) into the computer I looked up and saw this...
snow.jpg


That squall lasted about half an hour and then I was back to blue skies and fluffy clouds again.
 
Are those yucca or palm trees in the foreground?
I remember seeing snow a few times on the mountains surrounding the SFV. I also remember frying eggs on the sidewalk in front of my mom & dads house in a summer science experiment - mom wasn't too happy about it. :rolleyes:
 
Bruce, those are palms...there's a tree farm right down the hill from where I shot the picture. There are also native yuccas in the area. Here's one that was about 1/2 mile from where the snow pic was shot.

This shot was taken last May, a few weeks after a small brush fire:

Yucca 2 800.jpg

Then about a month later, it looked like this:

Yucca 1 800.jpg

Interesting plant life around here, though. (You already knew that, I'm sure.) Sort of desert, yet sort of forest. Last Wednesday we had the tree crew here cleaning up the deadwood from a couple 80' pines in our back yard. And the orange tree in the back yard is full of ripe oranges right now.
 
Vaughn....Here in Lewiston we get about 12" of moisture per year. 2" less we'd be a desert. We start watering our lawns in May or they'd be dormant by late June. We have 2 water systems....irrigation water and domestic water. Our temps are extremely mild for the area due to the elevation and we see temps in the summer above 110ºF and at or above 120ºF every few years. My neighbors had a yucca plant that grew quite well for quite a few years. In fact, when they hired an landscape architect and relandscaped their yard....they had a really tough time killing out that yucca. If I remember correctly, he finally just had to dig out anything that looked like it was part of the yucca plant. Roundup didn't seem to do much to it!
 
Hey don't be stingy with the snow huh? Send some our way. We got about 2 feet but the snowmobile trails are pounded down now and we could use some more. Well we always could use more.

As a side note, I got to get a map of Southern California. I got satellite TV so our "local" Fox network comes from LA. Its odd to see station signs starting with a K and hearing weathermen call "40 degrees a cold front, or hearing about an upcoming show at 8 pm when its 9 o clock already...Still I need a map because all the advertisers state what town they are in and I have no clue as to where they are on the map, or if fellow FWWer's live in that town. I know one thing though, I would never buy furniture from Sit and Sleep...his commercials make me want to hear nails on a chalkboard!
 
Travis, I live here and still don't know where a lot of the towns you hear about are actually located or how to get to them. Los Angeles County has nearly 480 towns or otherwise populated places, and nearly all of them touch others on all four sides. It's pretty much wall to wall civilization, so you can seldom tell where one town ends and another begins. I know my way around a handful of towns in my immediate vicinity, but there's a lot of LA that's a foreign land to me still, even after being here for over 16 years. (And a lot of parts I have no desire to visit, either.) ;) There are places all over a 100 mile radius that I know how to get to, but I tend to learn a route and stick with it. Having a navigation system in the car is very, very handy, though. Before the days of nav systems, nearly every car in town had a Thomas Guide, a 300 or 400 page detailed street map of LA and/or Orange County. A lot of people still do rely on the Thomas Guides.

And I agree with you...there is no way I'll ever darken the doorway of a Sit and Sleep store. I'll sleep on rocks before I'd give them my business. (I don't see the TV commercials since I seldom watch TV, but they are all over the radio out here, too.) The worst thing about the commercials...

They're FREEEEEEE! :bonkers:
 
It's by no means comparable to what a lot of you other folks have seen this winter, but it still doesn't match the mental picture most people have of sunny and warm Southern California. :rolleyes:

Whinge whinge whinge. Come up here and I'll let you shovel the snow off our backyard ice rink...
rink-snow.jpg
Took that shot 3 minutes ago through our back window


Travis, I live here and still don't know where a lot of the towns you hear about are actually located or how to get to them. Los Angeles County has nearly 480 towns or otherwise populated places,

2 yrs ago I was in LA visiting my friend who works at JPL. They took me to the LaBrea Tarpits. That was hilarious. First, I never knew that was a real place - I thought it was just something from Bugs Bunny cartoons... :rolleyes: then there is seeing this museum with tar ponds and archeological excavations going on smack dab in the middle of a city. Wild.

(Interesting place to visit though.)

And yes, they carry one of those monster LA atlas' in their car and were using it all the time. We also went hiking in Eaton Canyon (satellite view) which was also pretty cool. Again, weird to be driving through a subdivision, turn left, and find yourselves in an "isolated" canyon.

ta,
...art
 
Google Earth is undeniably cool. One of my brothers recently told me about its "sky view" mode, which I haven't looked at yet. It supposedly lets you investigate the universe to some degree; zooming in on stars and nebulae and stuff. :eek:

Anyway ... if you don't have the room (or inclination) to install Google Earth, you can still look at maps -- and satellite views! -- using the http://maps.google.com website. :thumb:
 
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