The Last Snow in L.A.
By Alissa Walker
Each morning starting in November, I walk out my front door and turn my gaze to the north. I stare for a moment. I scrunch up my face to shield my eyes from the glare. I squint very hard. A quick peek over my shoulder on a downtown crosswalk, an anxious glance through the bus window. When I drop my kids at school, there’s a really good spot on the front steps where I can stand on my tippy-toes to check. I live in Los Angeles, and when it gets cold, I’m looking for snow.
L.A. recently got some, as you might have heard. A blizzard, in fact. But I did not walk out my front door and into a snowdrift under a palm tree. To evaluate what constitutes “L.A.” and “snow,” we have to establish some geographic expectations. Los Angeles County (population 10 million; larger than 40 states) is bisected by multiple mountain ranges, with a peak elevation of 10,068 feet above sea level (Mount San Antonio, more commonly known by the name of the ski resort there, Mount Baldy). It snows in L.A. County every year. On a clear winter morning after a good snow in the San Gabriel range, its white triangles framing downtown L.A.’s neatly tiered towers in the foreground are reliably captured by the city’s best photographers, who gather at a popular vantage point in L.A.’s Baldwin Hills neighborhood for the money shot. If I showed you this photo and asked you to guess the city with no other context, you would probably say Denver.
Snow in the city of Los Angeles (population 4 million) is much more of a novelty, although it’s certainly not considered to be rare. The city itself is also bisected by multiple mountain ranges; Mount Lukens, on the northeast edge of the city limits, reaches 5,075 feet above sea level. The forecasts for cold winter storms often include a snowline that dips below 5,000 feet, and sometimes as low as 3,000 feet, creating a gasp-inducing dusting from Mount Lukens to Mount San Antonio that makes the following day’s L.A.-as-Denver shot even more convincing. Just a slightly lower snowline, say, down to 2,000 feet, and the Santa Monica Mountains might get their own frosting near the coast. Technically, this is all snow in L.A.
But if you live where I live in L.A. — where most people live in L.A. — snow doesn’t regularly fall here. That is, it doesn’t regularly fall anymore. Accumulating snowfall in the L.A. basin used to occur with a fairly predictable cadence; up until the middle of last century, downtown L.A. saw real snow every ten years or so. The last accumulable snow was in January 1949, when a three-day storm blanketed the entire region. “There was the San Fernando Valley nestled in a landscape of sifted flour,” wrote an astonished Marvin Miles, the aviation writer for the Los Angeles Times, as he described the scene from the sky: the Hollywood Hills “garbed in frigid frosting,” Silver Lake “etched in cotton,” Pasadena’s Rose Bowl a “dishpan full of milk.” The only real contrast — “except for an occasional swimming pool” — were the streets, Miles wrote: “dark paths crisscrossing the white floor.” In one of the photos, the brand-new lanes of the 101 Freeway are seen slicing through the Cahuenga Pass, two black parallel bars in the snow, and between them, the barely discernible tracks of the Pacific Electric streetcar chugging through the storm. Within a few years, that train, like most of L.A.’s original rail network, had disappeared, and so had L.A.’s once-per-decade snowfall. These milestones are related. The city is, on average, four degrees Fahrenheit warmer now than it was in 1949. Our snowless city can be partially attributed to what was emitted by the cars we drove — and also because we paved most of L.A. to accommodate them.
But starting on February 21, the city of L.A. had a fairly good shot at getting flurries. As a frigid atmospheric river storm — one of 16 this season, and counting — churned towards the coast, Daniel Swain, a UCLA climate scientist who serves as a kind of snow whisperer for the state, issued a remarkable forecast for L.A.: a dramatically low, 1,000-foot snowline. “Just about everybody who lives in California will probably be able to see snow, at least in the nearby hills,” he said. When the snow appeared as promised, no one had to look for it. The peaks hung in the sky, stark and dazzling, but they also crept up on you, unexpectedly sliding into frame between buildings. The snow had plunged so low that its very presence seemed to convince Angelenos of their proximity to their local mountain ranges for the very first time.
While driving east through Beverly Hills (low-key excellent for snow-spotting) Susan Sarandon snapped a photo captioned “Snow capped mountains?!?” seemingly in disbelief — although right there in the photo is a street that was named “Alpine” a century ago maybe for a reason. And, for the next week, historic low-elevation snow did fall throughout the city of L.A., perhaps as low as 1,000 feet, although where, exactly, was up for debate. In the L.A. neighborhood of Tujunga, in the foothills of the San Gabriels: snow; at the Hollywood Sign: more likely graupel, where flakes that fall through above-freezing air get rolled up into tiny icy snowballs. Skiers didn’t have to go to Mount Baldy — and besides, the roads were closed anyway — Mount Lukens was skiable within city limits.
When it snows in L.A. there’s a popular type of caption that accompanies the incredulous TikToks and Instagram Stories: “This is because of climate change” or “This is what climate change looks like.” But as Swain describes it, climate change is not the reason we’re squabbling about graupel-or-snow around the Hollywood Sign; climate change is the reason that slushy graupel isn’t a few inches of feathery powder. The conditions that produce snow — namely, below-freezing temperatures — are occurring less in L.A. and the days during which it could happen at all are becoming fleetingly rare.
But at the same time, L.A. isn’t necessarily destined for a permanent snow drought. The powerful, moisture-saturated storms generated by a warmer Pacific Ocean create a phenomenon Swain calls precipitation whiplash: over the past 10 years, California has experienced most of the state’s snowiest years on record, but also most of the state’s least-snowy years on record. “In other words, two of the three snowiest years and two of three of the least snowy years, by many definitions, in the same decade — and some in consecutive back-to-back kinds of conditions,” he said. “So even as the average snowpack declines, we’re still getting these individual huge snow years.” And as snowfall events under 1,000 feet become more rare, over 5,000 feet they also become more potentially dangerous.
“It made a lot of folks happy who got to experience the novelty flakes at the lowest elevations,” said Swain. “It made a lot of other people not so happy who were dealing with heavier and even historic accumulations at higher elevations.”
As people in L.A.’s foothills snapped selfies and skidded down hillsides suddenly fluffy with few inches of powder, one hour away, people trapped by an unprecedented ten feet of snow were posting videos begging their elected officials for helicopter drops of food and medicine. A dozen people died, unable to dig themselves out. Some people were stuck for over three weeks. A stranded resident stomped out an ominous plea captured from the air: “Help us.” Now when I stepped out my door, I eyed the snow-capped panorama apprehensively, knowing the next wave of storms would be warmer: piling more heavy snow atop communities unprepared for the burden, while also streaking away much of that white into torrential floods below.
At our house — elevation 319 feet, a few miles outside downtown L.A. — it only ever rained. It rained so much that our basement (like snow, a basement is a true rarity in L.A.) filled like a bathtub. I stood ankle-deep in the water seeping up beneath plastic bins of photo albums and thought about what Swain said: 75 years ago, I might have been shoveling my sidewalk, not sump-pumping my cellar. The next day, when the skies cleared, we made our way over the Cahuenga Pass for CicLAvia, L.A.’s roving open-streets event, held rain or shine — or flakes, we joked, fingers crossed. No “landscape of sifted flour” awaited us in this corner of the San Fernando Valley, but for today, and today only, the too-wide, too-warm expanses of asphalt were filled not with cars but with people. There were more signs that we, as a city, were possibly opting for a different destiny: at the far west end of the route, there was a former rail line through the Valley which, instead of being absorbed by a freeway, had been transformed into the country’s most successful bus rapid transit system. But as I dodged the puddles that fanned behind my kids’ bike wheels, still distracted by the majestic mountains, the snow on the horizon seemed to get farther and farther away. I wondered how hard my kids will have to squint to find it.
Alissa Walker is a senior writer at Curbed.
Weathered is a recipient of a generous grant from the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in the Fine Arts. Head to the Madlener House to see their new exhibition, “A different kind of tender and practice of overhealing,” works by Katherine Simóne Reynolds. Visit grahamfoundation.org to learn more.