With an atmospheric river bringing rain and snow to California this week, the state's mountains began to turn from the brown of summer to the white of winter.
Mammoth Mountain is expected to get about 2 feet of snow Tuesday night. UC Berkeley's Central Sierra Snow Laboratory predicted up to a foot at its location near Lake Tahoe, said lab director Andrew Schwartz.
The snow came at a time when snow levels dropped to near zero across the Sierra Nevada mountain range after melting over the summer. Additionally, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration declared last week that La Niña conditions had arrived. The oceanic phenomenon is a determining factor in drought.
But experts told the Times that the early storm got the state off on the right foot.
On Tuesday afternoon, many of the mountain cameras across the Golden State maintained by UC San Diego's ALERTCalifornia camera network showed blackout conditions.
The video below shows Frazier Mountain rising over Interstate 5 near Gorman on Tuesday.
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In the video, snow covers the top of the mountain whose peak is about 8,000 feet, about 2,000 feet below Mount Baldy.
The video below shows Bald Mountain in the southern Sierra, within the Sequoia National Forest.
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Its slightly higher peak, around 9,400 feet, saw a significant amount of snow on Tuesday, with more expected overnight.
The storm, classified as a weak or Level 1 atmospheric river, brought enough moisture to Southern California's drought-stricken landscape to delay the fire season for weeks, if not months.
“In some ways, this is like a Goldilocks atmospheric river,” said Marty Ralph, director of the Western Climate and Extreme Waters Center at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at UC San Diego. “It's only fair that it's beneficial at this time of the year.”
Times staff writers Hannah Fry, Clara Harter and Alex Wigglesworth contributed to this report.
