Lake Tahoe area buckles under 52 feet of snowfall
Rather than use a yardstick, Deanne Maas measures each new snowstorm at her house atop Donner Summit by carefully examining the widening cracks in her drywall.
Some of them now reveal the underlying studs — signs that more than a dozen feet of snow piled outside her house are buckling the walls and roof of her home. She can hardly see outside anymore, as snow covers almost all of her windows.
“I feel like I live in a snow cave,” said Maas, 46.
Even for a place so accustomed to receiving some of the highest seasonal snowfall totals in the continental United States, this winter is a doozy. The Lake Tahoe area is buckling under hundreds of inches of snowfall amid one of its most powderfilled seasons on record, all part of a historic run of atmospheric rivers and punishing arctic blasts that have filled reservoirs, flooded cities and eased drought conditions across California.
The latest storms this weekend pushed the snowpack atop Donner Summit into fourth place on the list of snowiest seasons for the area, topping 624 inches since Oct. 1 at UC Berkeley's Central Sierra Snow Lab, just a few miles from Maas' house.
For her and other residents in the northern Sierra Nevada and Lake Tahoe areas, this winter represents a study in extremes, whipsawing between outright fatigue and unbridled joy at seeing the region finally blanketed in shimmering powder. While many homeowners voice deep anxiety about their roofs collapsing underneath the mounds of snow atop them, they also crack smiles while praising one of the best ski seasons in years.
“I'm tired — my back is killing me,” said Nelson Rodgers, 25, after shoveling three feet of snow from the front deck of his Tahoe City home. “I've been here 15 years and I've never seen anything like this. The snowpack is ginormous.”
Same goes for Maas, whose husband has done almost nothing over the last two weeks besides plow their football field-length driveway along Towle Mountain Drive near the crest of Interstate 80. Routinely impassable road conditions have often forced the couple to miss work as a waitress and builder.
“I always say: Living on Donner Summit is like childbirth — you forget the pain in the summer,” Maas said.
That pain has been exceptional across the Sierra Nevada this year.
Storms this winter hit the southern Sierra Nevada with particular ferocity, piling the snowpack to more than 250% of its seasonal average, according to the California Department of Water Resources. At times, those storms have turned deadly — a late February blizzard in San Bernardino County trapped residents for weeks, forcing families to ration their food, according to local media reports.
In the northern Sierra, a half-dozen buildings, including airport hangars, collapsed in recent weeks near Nevada City, said Mary Eldridge, a Cal Fire spokeswoman. In South Lake Tahoe, two commercial buildings recently collapsed, along with the overhangs for a couple of gas stations. The roof of another flat-roofed warehouse in Tahoe City also recently gave way.