S'no Go for SF Snow

That's my front yard, all right, but it is a photo taken by my father in 1976.

Everybody was all excited about the possibility of snow in San Francisco--and the Bay Area--this weekend. Though we live up against the Coast Range, it only snows down here at sea level about once every twenty or thirty years.

We knew, whatever happened, we wouldn't have to worry about shoveling it. Unlike the residents of, say, Minneapolis, where a friend of mine told me she had endured eighty inches of snow this winter and the roof and sides of her home are so covered with the stuff she feels as if she lives in a snow cave.

For us--the cities circling San Francisco Bay--it was just the novelty of the thing. Alas, alack and Alaska: It appears that big storm from up Fairbanks way didn't quite materialize as predicted.

Back in the twentieth century, when I was but a youth, we had one Sunday when the snow really did fall here in Los Altos, California and stuck to the ground.

That is me in the scarf and my sister in the ski sweater, throwing snowballs at our father the photographer. © Robin Chapman

I remember the day so clearly. We had a neighbor from St. Paul, Minnesota who had moved in across the street and she and my mother sat chatting in the living room as the snow flakes drifted down.

"It's snowing!" I kept pointing out the big picture windows. "It's snowing out there!"

My mother and the neighbor were not impressed. Finally the lady said to me:

"It is just snow, for heaven's sake. Don't be so excited."

I left the room in disgust. Maybe they saw a lot of snow in St. Paul, where she grew up, and in Spokane, where my mother grew up--but where I grew up, this was front page stuff. (I guess I was a born reporter).

My father, a native of Birmingham, Alabama, was able to get excited about it, and he joined my sister and me outside for some fun. He, being a boy, wanted to throw snowballs at everyone. We, being girls, just wanted to get pictures.

Here is the side yard of our house--the house where I live today--on that one snow day, way back when. © Robin Chapman

Later, when I moved to Washington D.C., I still found snow an interesting novelty. It doesn't snow much there either, and it always meant some producer would send me out to stand in the stuff with a television crew and say: "I'm here at the Silver Springs Metro station, and it is snowing heavily ..." Once I said to my news director, "But they know it is snowing. What do I have to go out and stand in the stuff?" And he gave me a very good answer: "Robin," he said. "This is television."

Bethesda, Maryland and the little house I owned back then, when I worked as a reporter in Washington, D.C.

I was looking forward to a little flurry of it out here in Northern California. Not enough to shovel. No requirement that I go broadcast in it. But, for now, we will have to be content to enjoy the snow only in our memories and our imaginations. And, I have come to believe this is probably the very best way to enjoy a heavy snowfall.

That's Bessie and me in Bethesda, Maryland.

If you have snow photos from the higher elevations around the San Francisco Bay area this weekend, or from anyplace else you'd like to share with my readers, send your photos and stories to me at rchapsblog@gmail.com and I will put them up on the blog.

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Snow in the Palo Alto Hills

Snow on Skyline Boulevard above San Francisco Bay, December 7, 2009.

It was raining softly when I arose this morning to a chilly dawn. The forecasters said we could expect snow in the higher elevations above San Francisco Bay. As I headed out to the nursing home at 7:30 this morning, you could see the white stuff in the hills above Palo Alto and Los Altos.

I decided to drive up to Skyline Boulevard after breakfast with my father (Mom is still taking a tray in her room) and was dismayed to see very little snow when I got up to Alice's Restaurant at the intersection of Woodside Road, La Honda, and Skyline.

"Oh, we had a lot this morning," they told me. "But it is already starting to melt."

Alice's Restaurant on Skyline Boulevard with melting snow on the roof and stair rail.

Alice's Restaurant (named after the place in the song, not the other way around) is a great little joint for big breakfasts, hamburger lunches, and evenings of acoustic guitar and banjo strumming. On the weekends, the place is jammed with rich guys pretending to be bikers who park their Harleys out front, and with their bicycling counterparts. I've learned that on weekdays, it is much less busy and is a fun place to get away from the crowds in the Santa Clara Valley. But where was the snow I could see from down there?

"Drive down toward Page Mill," they told me. "It is about five hundred feet higher and they have about half a foot."

So off I went in search of the white stuff. Skyline Boulevard runs, as it would suggest, all along the crest of the Coast Range, between the Pacific on one side, and the San Francisco Bay on t'other. It has always been a beautiful road, though I hesitate to say it was originally used by the companies who logged all the redwood trees that used to cover the hills. Today, at one spot, the sky was so clear I could see the Pacific Ocean. And then I got into the snow.

Looking out the windshield of the Swedish Car, into the surprising snow in the Palo Alto Hills.

Along a stretch between Woodside Road and Page Mill, California's Skyline Boulevard, just five miles from the Pacific as the crow flies, was looking a lot more like Colorado. But it wasn't going to last and the denizens of the hills probably won't have enough left to claim a white Christmas.

Snow is like a big paint brush. Everywhere you look it has left you with a pretty picture in place that looked ordinary the day before.

I turned on Page Mill, to head back down to Los Altos and caught a glimpse of an animal in the field across the road. I don't have a great camera, so the focus isn't good, but what I saw was a fox, and when I took its picture, I frightened another one nearby. Mr. and Mrs. Fox were out, slyly looking for lunch. I know you'll tell me they were probably coyotes, but I've seen coyotes up there and they're much more scraggly. Believe me, these two foxes are just the thing ladies used to wear on their shoulders. No wonder they decided to trot away when they heard my footsteps. Perhaps they've heard through the grapevine that I shop at Neiman Marcus, the one place they've spent their lives hoping to avoid.

It wasn't much, I guess. A little snow above San Francisco Bay and a couple of beautiful animals. But it brought to mind a question my mother asked me when I saw her this morning in the nursing home. "What," she asked me, "did I ever do to deserve this?" I was thinking of responding with a list, but I knew that wouldn't have been nice. I went for a drive instead.

And I found myself asking myself the same question (in the obverse) about my morning drive. It was so beautiful, it was (almost) more than I deserved.

And it was certainly worth the seven-mile drive on the windy old wagon road. My wagon rode just fine, thanks, and seemed happy to have a brief dip into cold weather, before returning to the sunny valley below.

The Swedish Car, posing in the sunlight, at just about the snow line on Page Mill Boulevard.

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