Hilary is Pissed Off

[Tin Can]

I sure hope nobody decides

to go Mojave

Flash floods can come faster than most think

Good time to visit Idlewild

[Sal Santamaura]

...Good time to visit Idlewild

I'm not so sure about that. Sunday forecast there is the same as here in San Clemente: heavy rain, one inch during the day and another one to one and a half inches at night. The kind of thing that, in sarcastic southern California terms, tends to get real estate moving. :) Good time to stay home.

[Drew Wiley]

We'll know in a few days. If the flashflooding in Death Valley is even worse than three years ago, and elsewhere in the desert, it will be remarkable. They're barely catching up on road repairs from the prior event. It's not just the Mohave, but potentially all the way from Baja north to the Ruby Mtns in NE Nevada, on eastern slopes.
And the warning includes the eastern slope of the Sierra Nevada, especially above Owens Valley, where a number of unpaved roads and trail already washed out due to a flash flood a few weeks ago, above the desert that is, not over the crest. Palm Springs and Vegas are also under warning. Even the LA area should be on guard, especially around burned slopes subject to landslides.

[BrianShaw]

I'm getting my roof repaired today... just in time for verification/validation testing.

[Drew Wiley]

Well, I just dropped off my 4WD truck at the tire shop. Not going to gamble on any photo trips out that direction with all these weird storms going on. Want decent tread.
Roof is a different story. Got all the suspect areas patched after the exceptional windstorm last autumn. But all the roofing is old; so I sure hope that event wasn't symptomatic of things to come. I have serious roofing equipment; but at my age, I'm never going up and doiwn tall extension ladders again, and sooner or later will need to pay someone else to do it.

[Ironage]

Maybe the Salton Sea will be replenished. Obviously in times past there was more rainfall in those valleys. Mono Lake as well…


Sent from my iPad using Tapatalk

[Drew Wiley]

Doubt it. If anything is predictable in the West, it's that water theft is even more active than storms and hurricanes. The Salton Sea itself is the result of a break in LA's siphon hose, so to speak. It hasn't been a natural lake since the close of the Ice Age.

[Mark Sampson]

Maybe the edge of the storm will reach Tucson. Rain would come in handy (famous last words).

[Drew Bedo]

Stay out of the slot canyons for a few days!

[Drew Wiley]

I wouldn't worry about entering slot canyons. They'll be so clogged with motorhomes, giant boulders, and deep mud, and maybe bodies too, that there won't even be an entrance. But that could just as well apply to Interstate underpasses, if you throw in a dozen homes, several semi-trucks, and a swept-away Burger franchise too.

All the NP's and NM's in that part of the world are just plain closed at the moment, prohibiting any kind of entry. And people are advised not to drive ANYWHERE until this storm is over; and even then, who knows how many roads will have been outright mauled and might takes months to repair? They've just recently reopened the paved roads into Death Valley after the flash flooding of two years ago, and now it's predicted to be even worse this time around.

[Mark J]

I bought Eliot Porter and Octavio Paz's book about Baja California in 1987 when I was a student in W.London. Wonderful evocative book.
Let's hear it for the 'Geography of Hope' !

[John Kasaian]

Word from my daughter in LA is that the roof is leaking like a sieve and the walls of her apartment are blistered.
In Fresno, it's going to take a toll on the raisin crop for sure, but nothing really bad other than a few trees blown down and power outages.
I haven't heard much yet from the mountain communities.

[Drew Wiley]

It already dumped six inches of rain at Borrego Springs, the little town serving a huge State Park near the Mexican border, a beautiful area resembling a mini Death Valley (but certainly not small itself), and itself highly sculpted by flash floods over the millennia. The one good thing about all of this is that tourism is quite low in the summer in many of these areas due to the extreme summer heat. Most people come in the winter and spring.

No up to date reports from Death Valley itself yet, or Owens Valley. The news footage of chocolate brown water going over roads and taking out long sections might have been borrowed as an example from last year's event. Both areas were still in the process of repairing road damage from flashflooding earlier.

It was muggy here in the Bay Area the last 24 hrs, but now the sea breeze seems to be coming in again. I only got about 2 minutes of hard rain out of it yesterday; most neighborhoods, none. But we're a long ways from the bulk of the storm, and only on the very fringe.

[John Kasaian]

YNP didn't close down for Hilary, according to a fellow who works in Yosemite.
The rain has passed us in Fresno and it's warming up quickly.
The almonds and stone fruit crops have taken a hit though.
It may be too early to do much damage to the citrus. We'll see.

[Dugan]

We're getting rain in the SF South Bay/ Peninsula.

[Drew Wiley]

Hmmm ... it's clouding back up here again too, mid-Bay. Might get a tiny bit of rain out of it. At least it's not still muggy. Still trying to see how hard an area down south got hit, where friends recently relocated to. But that might take awhile.

Yeah, John, I'm not particularly worried about taking a loop trip over Sonora and Tioga passes in upcoming weeks, but might find an issue trying to traveling above Owens Valley. They're reporting severe rain today clear up above Bishop, based on satellite readings - all those side roads uphill toward Bishop Pass, Whitney Portal, Cottonwood Pass, Onion Valley and Kearsarge Pass. Apparently everyone was evacuated already, so only once the storm has passed will anyone be able to even try to make an in-person visual assessment. A number of the unpaved trailhead access roads and other photogenic routes were destroyed by another flashflood incident just a month ago.
It could easily take another two or more years to repair the minor roads. Road maintenance muscle was already stretched to the limit following the hard winter.

[John Kasaian]

Merced is getting clobbered right now.
The wind has been picking up here in Fresno.
The Beashore Meadows road has been open and clear, at least it was last week. I don't know what mischief Hilary might have caused.

[Drew Wiley]

I don't know had mudslide-stable the roadside slopes are in the burned area around toward Beasore. I imagine they've been fairly stabilized by fresh growth the past couple of years. The meadow itself with its cabin escaped. It's all granite country, and not friable mudstone like much of the coast, or like the more decomposed rock characteristic of the mountains around LA, and its current slides. Beasore etc was right across the River. But getting to the upper road directly, climbing right up 22 running waterfalls on Sagninaw Creek, is nothing I'll ever repeat. I survived; but the waterfall gods weren't amused, and inflicted revenge anyway. I met my buddies for a little basketball in the high school gym that very evening, tripped over one the them, slammed my head into a projecting fire hose handle, broke a wrist, and needed my scalp stitched up.