Good morning, and welcome to Wednesday. There’s a chill today, with temps being a little lower than yesterday. However, roads are less icy than they were yesterday, at least in the Crestline area. Yesterday’s temps and breezes and traffic removed a LOT of the ice from our roadways, leaving dry dusty pavement for your tires to find purchase. This doesn’t mean that it’s time to let your guard down, though, as there are still plenty of icy patches, but it is an easier drive today, compared to yesterday.
Beware and be wary again of that one little patch of ice underneath the Crestline Bridge… but from there on down, you won’t find any significant ice at all. Gun it and go.
There’s no fog, and there are no rocks on the road. There’s no smoke, no fire, no hoards of locusts. There’s still half of a white car on Highway 138, so if you see somebody driving around with the other half of it, let ’em know where the front part is.
I’m not a big believer in weather prediction. Now, weather prognosticators can do a decent job of predicting weather 24 hours in advance… but 48 hours is a little sketchy, and becomes more of a guess than actual science-based prediction. 72 hours? Well, the guesses have even longer odds… but since we’ve got news agencies claiming to predict the weather for the next four, five, seven, even TEN days, well, each OTHER news agency has to do better than that, so everybody is claiming the ability to predict further and further into the distant future. Of course, sometimes, the guesses are even correct: A stopped clock is right twice per day. But there are simply too many unpredictable variables to enter the equation much farther out than 24 hours at a time.
Okay, rant and philosophy over: That said, predictions for the next 24 hours (which have SOME validity) are for a LOT of snow… and at low elevations. Los Angeles news agencies predict that in the Southern California area, the Inland Empire (that’s us) is going to get hit the hardest, with snow levels tonight falling to BELOW 1500 feet. We’re talking about 40th Street! The prognostication also calls for as much as 24 inches of the stuff at “higher elevations,” which I assume means Big Bear or better, perhaps even just some of the higher peaks and passes near there. Whatever… it’s still a lot of snow.
So… get ready. We may get hit with a cold winter storm that blankets the mountain from top to toe. The Apocalypse might be upon us… cross your fingers and hope for it!