The Winter That Didn't Want to go Away I didn’t think this winter would ever go away. It’s Little League time. During Little League practice you should be worrying about mosquito bites, not frostbite. Last week at my daughter’s game all of the parents who were outside were sitting on the east-side bleachers away from our team’s dugout. The north-side bleachers were just too freezing in the wind. The smart parents were in their cars with the heaters on. One mom came straight from work wearing a knee-high skirt. She was soon draped in a borrowed bedspread. Imagine what the temperature of Lake Gregory water is going to be at the end of the month when the swimming area opens up. There will be a bunch of people huddled in blankets on what is left of the shoreline. We have had several three-day stretches of “tree rain” up here in the “the glacier” (my neighborhood). While my neighborhood is shrouded in this wet fog, everywhere else in the town is bathed in sunshine, all while we’re being drenched by the fog “rain” coming off of the trees. I’ve seen it coming down in buckets before, but when I go to look on the Internet, nothing is showing on the radar. I hope the spring weather we have been enjoying lately keeps up. Next month I have to begin my volunteer forest patrols with the San Gorgonio Wilderness Association. On these patrols, volunteers hike the paths at 10,000 to 11,000 feet helping people with directions and checking their wilderness permits. I will be doing this in my little Smokey Bear khaki shirt and shorts. I don’t want to freeze my tail off in the middle of summer, and I don’t want to have to bring my crampons and ice axe to get to the top. If you look at the top of Old Greyback right now, you can see that it’s still pretty white up there. Our first winter here was like this, with ice balls falling on the house on May 31. I almost didn’t survive that first winter here. My office is on the bottom (third) floor of my downslope house, so it is the coldest room in the place. A small closet-like space behind a closed door in this office hides the house heater and the water heater. When the big heater would kick in I would open the door to that little room and it would heat up my office very nicely. However, every time I opened that door, I started noticing that I was getting groggy, and sometimes I would get a headache. This lasted for a few weeks. One time I even caught myself dozing off completely. Once the weather started warming up we stopped using the big heater and my problems stopped. A few weeks later I had to have a plumber look at my water heater. When he saw it he said, “Oh my gosh—you need to replace this thing soon.” He said I needed to fix the angle of the exhaust pipe immediately. He explained the corrosion on the top of the tank was caused not by water, but by carbon monoxide spilling out into the room. So every time I had opened that door to get a little heat, I was opening myself to the danger of falling asleep and never waking up again. That was scary. Something to take a closer look at when you live in Crestline.
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