The Great Mojave Snowstorm of 2008

With the possible exception of taking an extremely southerly route through Mexico, there is no guaranteed safe passage across North American in the wintertime in the worst of years.  Yes, one can assume that travel along the Gulf will not result in encountering any sudden blasts of winter weather, but even Houston and New Orleans have seen nights in the 20s and a good blast of snow now and then.  Likewise, despite encountering some of the driest lands in the world moving further west, the desert seems to forget it is a desert sometimes, and otherwise bone dry, 110+ degree locations in the summer can turn into frigid deathtraps in which the local driving population is sorely unprepared.  In December 2008 in the Mojave Desert, the land became blanketed with well over two feet of snow.  

Now, yes, those are desert evergreen plants in that picture, and what you see is a normally toasty portion of the Mojave outside of Baker, California.  The snow also persisted for over a week, with temperatures remaining low for the duration.  It was a strange event, all the more so because everything else on the trans-continental trip had not at all prepared me for an actual blizzard.  Yes, there was an absolute terror of a snowstorm in the Rockies, and yes, the higher elevations around a place as close as Cedar City, Utah, were frigid in the single digits, but 30 miles later, a descent into the Mojave raised the temperatures into the 50s and the snow was melted, leaving the red landscape of St. George and environs even more brilliant than normal.  I did not have an unreasonable expectation in assuming that the even lower Las Vegas would feature similar milder conditions.  Instead, a blizzard ripped across I-15 near the end of the strip.

Yes, this is really Las Vegas, Nevada.  Let me tell you, the rates on rooms were amazing that night!

This was a really interesting experience, to say the least.  At the start of the descent into Las Vegas Valley, the external thermometer on the car was reading 46 degrees.  A drop from St. George's high of 50, but not a surprising one considering that there were fewer gaps in the clouds.  Then the numbers kept getting lower every mile until Las Vegas was reporting a chilly 32.  I wondered when the few raindrops falling from the now solid cloud sky would turn to snow, and sure enough, the normally baked landscape played host to a fair impression of a Great Lakes blizzard.  

Now, again, we are a cold continent.  Frost has been reported everywhere throughout our land except the Florida Keys, a thin strip of coastline in extreme southern California, and the tropical parts of Mexico (though even a place as far south as Tampico has seen it).  Jacksonville, Florida has seen snowfalls of several inches that managed to stick around for a while, and the last few years have seen arctic outbreaks which have threatened the citrus crops in the state.  At the same time, while these are not entirely unexpected occurrences, they are also not normal by any stretch of the imagination.  An average December day in the Mojave sits anywhere from the mid-50s to lower 60s, depending on elevation.  Some of the higher rises in the desert might see a dusting now and then, but it is hardly persistent.  The pools in Las Vegas stay open all year, and palm trees are a reality of landscaping throughout the region.  Worst of all, they do not have snow plows at the ready around these parts, and I-15 became a parking lot at the border with California.  This, of course, led to a night in Vegas and a chance to see what happens to palms in the snow.

This would be the famous "Whiskey Pete's" in tourist tr... er Primm, Nevada.  The hotel was packed with stalled travelers.  

Let me tell you, palms and snow do not mix.  Your hardly desert dwellers like the California Fan Palm (Washingtonia Filifera) and such are used to the occasional upset like this, but they still get weighed down and look very, very sad.  In the same fashion, the local drivers know that things are more dangerous when frozen and slushy, but like the palms bent under the weight of the snow, they cannot help but apply their defenses and hardiness with a lack of grace and hit the brakes hard enough to get locked into some truly embarrassing fish-tailing.  Again, this can happen, but it rarely does, but then it also gets remembered.  While it might be convenient to blame climate change for a mess like this (and the frequency of such events does tend to support the theories out there), the fact is that travelers have historically encountered such shocking visits from Father Winter.  Juan Bautista de Anza and his expedition, in fact, encountered one heck of a snowstorm down in the warmer Sonoran Desert not far from Palm Springs, California!  

Southbound I-15 approaching the 4,900 foot pass that in the Mescal range near the California/Nevada border.

 Travel inconveniences aside, the snow tends to melt pretty quickly in the lower elevations and urban areas.  By the next day, downtown Las Vegas had chunks of ice in the shadows of buildings, but not much in the way of snow except a little dusting on the grass and in the trees.  The higher elevations, though, like the mountains pictured above near Ivanpah Dry Lake in southern California, continued to carry a load of the white stuff well into the next week.  The result was stunning, to say the least, and even left dry lakes like Ivanpah with a bit of water in them for a while.