LOS ANGELES (AP) — Ski season is still at least several months away, but the unusually cold storm that froze West Coast mountain peaks late last week brought a taste of winter to August.
The calendar briefly jumped to November as the system moved from the Gulf of Alaska across the Pacific Northwest to California.
Mount Rainier, southeast of Seattle, was covered in snow at high elevations, as was the Mt. Bachelor resort in central Oregon.
“We were excited to see the flakes flying!” Presley Quon, Mt. Bachelor’s communications manager, said in an email to The Associated Press on Monday. “A nice reminder that ski season is just around the corner.”
Mount Shasta, the 4,317-meter-high volcano in the Cascade Range in northern California, was covered in a blanket of white after the storm clouds passed.
Helen Lake, at an elevation of 10,200 feet (3,170 meters), received about half a foot (15.2 centimeters) of snow, with even more at higher elevations, according to the U.S. Forest Service’s Shasta Ranger Station.
Snowfall amounts ranging from a quarter inch to a half inch (0.63 to 1.27 centimeters) fell in the Sierra Nevada and highlands of Yosemite National Park on Saturday, said Carlos Molina, a meteorologist at the National Weather Service office in Hanford, California.
The last August snowfall in this area occurred in 2003.
The storm was essentially a one-off event, as such systems typically move through the Pacific Northwest along the Canadian border toward the northern Rocky Mountains and then into the Great Lakes region, Molina said.
“This storm had so much cold air associated with it that it was actually able to combat the hot air we have here in California and push the heat dome away from us,” he said.
At Mammoth Mountain Resort in the Eastern Sierra, a “good blanket of snow” fell, but not enough to report an official snow depth, said spokeswoman Emily van Greuning.
