395 is always my preferred route in the northwest, and after two days of doing the Nevada deserts I grabbed it and kept going from Reno, to Honey Lake, CA, southward of Susanville.<\/p>\n
First off, seeing the Sierras is a complete shock. There is no snow at all except some dustings in the shady places at the tops. Official estimates are 5-9% of normal snowpack, a completely absurd number. Last fall I speculated how ugly things would get if they even had normal snow; it didn’t occur to me they wouldn’t get any.<\/p>\n
Back in Las Vegas, Lake Mead is at 40% normal level. This will supply the Colorado until it gets to 0%, but there is no snowpack to bring it up. It’s like my batteries in the winter: after a few days of discharging them, it takes several days to get them charged again. Filling Lake Mead could take decades.<\/p>\n
Oddly, I’m making great time towards the Columbia River, but might be stopped tomorrow in Oregon by snow. I am driving straight into a cold and wet thing and could well get stopped dead along the way. I have no options to change direction as the front covers the entire region.<\/p>\n
My best bet is to get into a safe spot tomorrow then watch to see what happens.<\/p>\n
In other words, in the worst possible draught imaginable, I run the risk of getting snowed in…. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
395 is always my preferred route in the northwest, and after two days of doing the Nevada deserts I grabbed it and kept going from Reno, to Honey Lake, CA, southward of Susanville. First off, seeing the Sierras is a complete shock. There is no snow at all except some dustings in the shady places […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1158","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1158","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1158"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1158\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1161,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1158\/revisions\/1161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1158"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1158"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.martincassidy.com\/wordpress\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1158"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}