Extremes

It was a day of extreme weather today in the desert. It's rare that the weather is so interesting here. Eight months out of the year, it's warm and dry in the morning, then hot and windy in the afternoon, and then warm and really windy in the evening. But not today.

In the morning, it was cold and cloudy. When the clouds burned off, they revealed snow on the mountains, down to about 4,000 feet -- some in the hills just above the floor of the Antelope Valley; even the tops of Tenhi Mountain and Mount Emma, which flank the freeway going to Los Angeles, were dusted. No snow reached down to the populated areas, but there was what seemed like an awful lot of rain and nearly every street was flooded out in the morning.

The temperature rose to the mid-fifties in the afternoon and my jacket felt uncomfortably warm when we came back from lunch. All the snow on the lower levels of the mountains was gone; the snowline had retreated back to something like 6,000 feet. Then the wind blew again. Now, it's down to 38 degrees again and will probably freeze overnight.