Remember back in the winter of 2011 when we received 21 inches of snow?  Remember how crazy that was?  Remember how the city was almost completely shut down for a couple of days?  People didn’t show up for work because, well, they couldn’t get to work.  That was less than two feet of snow.  How do you think we’d handle a storm like the one headed towards Mt. Shasta in California over the next several days?  Yes, you read that correctly.  The forecast is calling for anywhere between 176-218 inches of snow over the next week near the 14,179 ft summit.  World records will be threatened!  Granted, mountain communities out west receive lots more snow than we do at our lower elevation, and they’re definitely equipped to handle most storms,  but it’s still funny to think of what something like that would do to a large urban center like ours.

When you’re a ski or snowboard junkie that likes to get out west as much as possible, you keep an eye on the weather like Tom Skilling.  Well, nobody focuses on weather quite as much as he does, but what I’m saying is when storms are dumping snow in the mountains out west, I know about it and it excites me to no end.  Do you know what 218 inches of snow turns into over time?  Glaciers.  It also forms a huge base that sticks to many parts of the mountain year-round, which makes climbing the mountain then snowboarding down it possible, even in late spring and early summer.  Visual evidence below!

And snow, baby, snow!!!

http://youtu.be/2VSu0-IrHNQ