SoCal Sledding

Hola!

Another week gone by—wow! I am playing catch-up on a few activities, so this will be a report on something we did a month ago.

Believe it or not, it does snow in Southern California! Not close to the beach, of course, where we live, but if you drive inland you can get to some pretty mountain areas and yes, snow! So, when we had “lots” of rain here in January, that meant “lots” of snow in the mountains. (We are desert terrain, remember…”lots” of precipitation just means “more than usual.” “Usual precipitation” here means “never.”)

Once it snows, you are on a time clock. If you want to ENJOY the snow, you better get up there within the week or it will be slushy ice, or half-melted, or gone. We look up Mt. Pinos online, and see that it received a foot or more of snow. We must go THIS Saturday, we reason, if we want to take advantage of it.

Sledding, for us, is an all-day event, of course. Get up and gather all cold-weather gear together: tubes, gloves, boots, sweatshirts, snow pants, coats, hats, extra socks, extra shoes to wear afterwards, water, lunch, snacks. The minivan is now filled to the gills with STUFF! The neighbors think we will be gone 3 weeks.

Drive 90 minutes (yes, we try to shave it down, but we can’t seem to get below that number of minutes). Get off the freeway, finally to the tiny town where we can wind up the mountain to the white stuff. Buy a state park day pass at Joe’s Liquor Mart, one of maybe 2 places that sell them, and you better do this because the park patrol people are BORED SILLY. (All they do all day is stare into the windshields of parked cars off the sides of the roads. If they can break the monotony and actually write up a ticket, they are ecstatic.)

Drive up, up, up, and lo and behold, now there it is! White and Fluffy! Only now, we have to find the Perfect Sledding Spot. Not too crowded, not too steep, not too used up by previous sledders. Another 30 minutes of scoping out sites. Luckily we can eat our lunch in the car as we scope.

All right, we found it! Yes, we can go here, and it’s not too crowded, and--icing on the cake--it’s not a death-trap. Happy day! Pile out.

Here are a couple of scrapbook pages I did from pictures taken on that day, and a few other photos also. It really was a lot of fun. David’s goal was to make the biggest snowball on the planet, so that’s what he’s working on.

Hope your week was eventful in a good way. More later, love, Kari