Winter returns – for now!

Another winter storm bears down on the Eastern Sierra for Easter weekend

Mammoth and the Eastern Sierra will get a brief break in the weather today, Thursday as an upper low continues its descent offshore of the West Coast but the next wave of storms is bearing down on the region, with snow and rain expected to blanket both ends of the Easter weekend. According to the National Weather Service’s Reno office, the next set of storms, while not bringing feet of snow, will be persistent and windy and cold, characterized by periods of valley rain and mountain snow through the weekend.

It might, however, not be as windy as past storms.

“At least winds appear to remain lower compared to the previous few Days,” forecasters said. “Snow probabilities greater than 6” for the weekend range from 20-60 percent for Mono Co with areas along U.S. Highway 395 around 10 percent or less. By Sunday, we should only be dealing with the wrap-around moisture of the low as it moves east over the Desert Southwest.

Mike Korotkin is the forecaster for Opensnow for Mammoth. He got into the details more: “We have a much bigger and more powerful storm on the heels of the Wednesday (Thursday morning) night system,” he said. “The storm has the high potential to double the snowfall amounts we received for Wednesday night.

Mammoth could look a lot more like this, this weekend as a series of storms bear down on the region for the Easter weekend. Here, Jairo Yanez helps clear out the snow from a storm earlier this month