Last week I played hookey for a day to take advantage of the
6+ FEET of fresh snow that had fallen in Lake Tahoe after a series of big storms. (I
*heart* to ski.)
That's obviously a huge amount of fluffy stuff, but per ususal, as I drove east into
the alpine heights of the Sierra Nevada mountains
along Interstate 80, the roads were plowed to hard-pack perfection — even though the snow was still falling.
Big Huge storms are a routine fact of winter life in Tahoe, and I'm always impressed by how skillfully the employees of Caltrans, California's highway administration agency, keep the roads clear — no matter how much snow Mother Nature throws at us. The folks at Caltrans work hard, of course, but they also get a big assist from an impressive arsenal of snow removal machinery that includes everything from dump trucks and plow-equipped graders to
giant robotic rotary plows.
My powder day at Squaw Valley USA was
sublime, thankyouverymuch, but it wouldn't have happened if the roads had been closed because of all the snow. So I send my gratitude (
once again) to the intrepid
"Sierra Snowfighters" from the Caltrans Kingvale Station for enabling my euphoria.
