The Panther Meadows walk-in campground didn't have any campers when I passed by in June 2016. The upper reaches of Mount Shasta in northern California were still thick with snow. I had pitched my tent in the woods about a mile down the mountain where the snow had mostly melted.

 Readers of this diary will know I keep an eye on weather conditions in California, particularly the areas where I have hiked in recent years. Needless to say that kind of travel has been impossible during the pandemic but I can wander in my mind's eye.

 Mostly I have had to report drought and wildfires so I was interested to see how things are shaping up this winter. On December 1st. the California snowpack was at 18% of the average, a historic low. By the end of the month it had reached 160% with more to come. The Lake Tahoe area for example has had massive dumps of snow after a summer of wildfires unprecedented in living memory.

 California depends on snow melt for a good deal of its tap water so this should go some way to replenishing its depleted reservoirs. In theory water after fire is a good thing but torrents of water rushing across 'burn scars' creates other problems like mud slides. Heavy snow is part of California's alpine ecology but the extreme volatility in weather systems does seem to be a global characteristic of climate change.

 

 NB I wrote a recollection of my visit to Shasta in an entry to this diary 21st. June 2017.